


Memoirs of a Long, Long Time

by AParisianShakespearean



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Body Worship, Chivalry, Denial of Feelings, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, From Sex to Love, Hurt/Comfort, Memoirs, Outdoor Sex, Parenthood, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:47:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27369751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParisianShakespearean/pseuds/AParisianShakespearean
Summary: Far away from the ones he loves, Rowan Cousland, the Hero of Ferelden, recalls the steps that brought him far from home. In his memoirs of a long time ago, he reconsiders his relationship with Morrigan, his complicated sorceress and lover. As he writes, she too in Skyhold reconsiders their romance, their home, their son, and the things she left unsaid when they first traveled together as a sorceress and knight.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford, Female Trevelyan/Cullen Rutherford, Male Cousland/Morrigan (Dragon Age), Morrigan/Male Warden (Dragon Age)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 31





	1. Last night, he dreamt

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure how many people would be interested in this story, but I've always been interested in a Warden/Morrigan pairing, and I think with my stress about current events I'm trying to channel my energy into creative pursuits. The story is a rough retelling of Origins with brief parts at Skyhold, and though it focuses primarily on the moments between game events. Please enjoy!

Last night, he dreamt of the Blight again, when her eyes weren’t yet home.

Minrathous is a magnificent city. Not even the night brings quiet or dark, as the streets are always lit in vibrant purple and blue lights curtesy of the magisters, with street vendors that stay up late into the night to sell their cloths and trinkets. Ferelden sleeps at night, but Tevinter doesn’t, and long past midnight he can venture to the city and find an open bistro or vendor to buy a skewer of spiced meat or bottle wine for his long nights spent reading and mapping. It’s comforting, to be a part of something grand, if one forgets what makes the city run the way it does, and he’s never truly able to. Yet even if that weren’t so, even if can forget, his Ferelden heart will always remain true. The city is grand but he prefers South Reach and Denerim, Highever. He misses home, and all parts that make it so.

He lives outside the city in an open tent with Carver, his companion. (How he got to work by Rowan’s side was curtesy of another legend as the people gossip, though he despises that word “legend.” At any rate it was a tedious diatribe about a certain woman named Hawke who sought shelter for her brother when rumors began to abound by a false Calling in Ferelden. Tevinter was far enough away from Ferelden, and he needed help in a journey that would also benefit Carver Hawke. So he came to his side, albeit a bit starstruck in the process—at least initially.) He chooses to remain outside the city for the sake of anonymity. Less people knew who he was in Tevinter than his homeland, curtesy of all those damn statues and monuments decreed by his old friend Alistair, though even with his beard and hair that had aged darker with time, he could sometimes be spotted and revealed as him, the Warden. It amuses him endlessly. There are many Wardens who are never recognized, and all he did was do what had to be done. On his journey now, he tells himself the same thing. It must be done. In their duty, they shouldn’t have to ask for this much. For those they loved, it was too much taken away.

He was the one that drunk the vial though, he bitterly counters. He did what he had to without knowing, but he would have done it anyway. That was when he had nothing left to lose. Now, he has everything left, so he uses precious time he could spend with the two of them to buy more time. After everything, he deserves to see his son grow.

He closes his eyes, the night his blanket. If he’s lucky tonight, he would dream of the Blight again. A Warden doesn’t usually want to dream of such things, he thinks with some irony. Though it’s better than other dreams, better than the Calling. Even so, he can’t fully disparage or regret the Blight. It led him to her.

He smiles. If she were here, she’d call him a fool. He’d tell her she’s the same fool, and she would laugh and agree. Only the fools rushed in, but in his life, he finds fools to be the happiest. He knows her, she would tell him, if she were here, _I love you Rowan._

 _I know my love,_ he would reply. She’s far away and yet he sees her scarlet blush.

She mocks sweet words from others but gives them so willingly to both himself and their son. Just in her last letter she peppered it with word after word of honeyed sweetness. _Rowan,_ it read. _Your son is safe and the same, though his favorite book is now the one you’ve always talked about, the one with Ferelden Myths and Legends. He misses you and talks of you often. At the behest of Celene we are now at Skyhold, headquarters of the Inquisition, which I am sure you have heard of by now. Leliana is here, she claims she knows where you are, and I do not doubt it. (Did you tell her? You always were soft with her, dolt.) I know your duties force you to remain but even so, you must stay away, for now. Of why, I’m sure you already know._ _I wish you could see the fortress, truly it is grand, a place where once the ancient elves lived. If you close your eyes you can feel the innate quiet power._

She wrote more, but pulling out the letter to reread, Rowan skips to his favorite part, the ending. _Rowan, I’d like you here to wrap my arms around you, though you already knew that, and I even deigned to write it down…_

A small victory, Rowan thought as he read it the first time, and then again as he reread. She offered few words of love, much fewer than himself, as sometimes he felt he was made of words. He learned in their early days she could be swayed with trinkets and gifts, but it was words she loved most of all. It took her a long, long time to realize, and then they both tasted victories.

 _Tell me more, s_ he wrote before signing _your Morrigan._ _I need more. Tell me everything. I want to hear it all, and then I’ll tell Kieran. I await your return._

He closes his eyes before tucking the letter in his breast pocket, close to his heart. He remembers the first dream.

* * *

He dreamed the night before Duncan came of a woman that resembled her. It should have been impossible, but their relationship had never been affected by the trappings of time. In his dream she laughed merrily and asked him to follow her someplace he couldn’t say where, and when he reached out his hand, she disappeared. He learned long ago not to tell anyone his dreams that he managed to remember come morning lest he be mocked, so like all others, he kept the dream woman to himself. He should have brushed it off late into the afternoon as he might have other days, but it wasn’t a normal morning or day. His father and brother were going to leave Highever with their armies. A Blight was coming.

Before his life was bound by duty, his life was bound by his name: Rowan Cousland, the second son of Teryn Bryce Cousland. He was twenty-three the day the world changed, set to remain at Highever and take care of the estate. Of course, his mother saw that far off look in his eyes as he dreamed of other things, the day before the night changed everything no different.

“I know what you’re thinking darling,” his mother said to him, his mabari Hohaku at his side. “But you must not go around thinking you’ll go and join the Grey Warden.”

“He seems a fine fellow,” Rowan said, rather wistful. “Would you rather me join the circus?”

“I’d sooner see you off with those actors,” she replied.

He smiled with wistful remembrance. During his “tenure,” if he could call it that with the traveling actors known as the Province Players, his family never appreciated his own appreciation for the theatre. It was too unseemly for the teryn’s son to be a patron of the theatre, more so for him to appear in a few shows at the estate. Despite that one of the teryna’s favorite memories, though she would never admit it, was when the traveling actors performed _The Tragedy of the Lady of the Skies._ She looked for Rowan in the crowd, only to find him front and center as one of the leading characters, dying rather dramatically halfway through the second act. Rowan lived most of his life after thinking his mother never appreciated the moment.

But she smiled at him that day before the world changed, and he knew the truth. She loved his dramatics, loved all parts of him, even the parts that others cast with disdain.

She didn’t want him to join, and no, Rowan wouldn’t have joined the Wardens if Duncan had asked him at that moment. His brother and father were already on their way to fight in their war, and though he had some ideas of the grandeur of battle, passed on from his father’s stories of the glories of the last war with Orlais, his mother asked him to stay, do what he must do. The Couslands always did their duty.

Though, truth to be told he had the fewest duties as the youngest scion of his house, and he wasn’t immune to the whispers spoken around Highever—that Bryce and Eleanor’s second son was wayward and a fool, absorbed in stories and fantasy. Shame they never saw his performances, as they wouldn’t have called his performances fool’s talents. The one thing Howe or Bann Lorien or any of the others couldn’t disparage was his prowess with the sword, though Rowan kept it to himself he learned his skills through spite. Whispering nobles called him too sensitive when he was young, so much so that the death of one of weaker pups in the mabari kennels drove him to inconsolable tears at ten years old. He learned to fight not because he didn’t want stewards, or Arl Howe, or anyone to think him weak. He wanted to see that yes, he could wield different strengths. He showed them all, and his victory was greater than it would have been had he had that spark of perceived greatness.

That was if the way of the sword could even be conceived as greatness. He learned when he first met Briana, one of the actresses in the Province Players that words were the most powerful tools anyone had. Briana wasn’t amused with his victories in tournaments, she only cared for words. He wooed her with words he learned in books, words he made up derived from stories. It was a propensity his mother had as well, as she told him stories in his youth and even as he grew she wasn’t averse to sentimentality or tenderness—it was why Morrigan’s early coldness perplexed Rowan so much, though as his current letters received near Minrathous indicated, she grew accustomed to them, for certain individuals she would both give and receive to. Or, perhaps it was Rowan who was the one that learned to give words only to the deserving.

But, his thoughts digressed to a future he couldn’t fathom then as he stood there with his mother as only Rowan Cousland. Before his world changed, he merely thought his life would change in only a small way, that staying in Highever they’d understand he could play the games of social politics and maneuvering his brother Fergus had always been good at. His mother told him “I love you, my darling boy,” and boyishly he replied he wasn’t a boy any longer. She amused him and told him he was right. He was a grown man now who could make his own decisions. If he had to say it, he should have known it wasn’t true.

Like a boy, he begged his bleeding father to come with them, disbelieving this had happened, that his nephew was slaughtered and his old nanny slaughtered and his father was dying. He’d join the Wardens, he’d do anything he wanted…just get up, he begged his father, dammit get up and fight and we will avenge together.

 _I can’t,_ his father said. _Rowan, pup…_ he always called him pup when he was a boy… _we Couslands do our duty._

It convinced him, just barely. He would have gone without any complaints, done whatever Duncan wanted, until his mother resolved to stay.

“You’re coming with me Mother,” Rowan said, the Grey Warden’s presence heavy behind him. “We’re going to get out of here.”

_You don’t control me Rowan._

Such words he never heard before. He didn’t want to control her, he loved her and wanted her alive. He wanted both of his parents alive, but if he couldn’t have his father then at the least, he could save his mother. That wasn’t what was to be. He saw the look in her eyes.

 _Then I will stay_ , he said. _I won’t leave you. My duty is to stay here, avenge._

 _No darling, live,_ she said, gentle, caressing his face. _Become a Grey Warden._

 _No_ , he said. He wouldn’t. Fuck glory and the grandeur of battle, he would do his duty.

And Duncan spoke the words that should have undone his joining, should have killed him outright after he took the vial: _I invoke the right of inscription._

* * *

Rowan spent much of his time on the way to Ostagar thinking Duncan thought him a coward and a fool. He was neither, but heartbroken and defeated, unworthy of his family’s sword and shield. Once, after they mad camp and Duncan offered him a loaf of bread, a gesture of goodwill he declined, he had the gall to call Rowan _my lord._

Lord of what? He wanted to demand, but he already proved himself a boy and muttered “Rowan is fine.” Maker, he would have cried if he were alone. Hokahu would have comforted him as he used to do when he was a child. Of course, he had just proven how much of a child he still was.

But he wasn’t alone, and so he didn’t. He looked weak enough already.

“A fine name,” Duncan replied, though his eyes looked sad, mournful for him. At least there was that.

And then Rowan told the Warden something foolish, that his mother, pregnant with him, first felt him kick when she was under a rowan tree. “I never liked it,” he even admitted. “It’s not in the family, like my brother’s.”

Odd the things you say, when you lose everything. Duncan understood that and humored his stories, proving he wasn’t all bad, and he told him he could make his own name mean whatever he wanted.

“Seems I’m to be a Warden,” he said, crossing his arms. “What can one Grey Warden do?”

And Duncan replied, “find out.”

It would take him time to find out, but for that moment, his thoughts traveled to the dream woman. She must have been an omen of death, warning him of what was to come.

In Tevinter, far away from that moment, Rowan smirks.

Well. Morrigan was a death of another sort, in a way.

* * *

It’s hot in Tevinter. He didn’t like it, the Ferelden in him. He was cool water and mountain air, the heat of fire after shaking snowflakes off his hair. The heat however isn’t why he can’t sleep.

He keeps thinking of that boy who left with Duncan after being conscripted, and that boy that fell for a gentle, wild, tenacious woman in the midst of doing what it commonly referred to as duty. He thinks of the man that told her he loved her and watched her go, who never held his son until he was a year old. What a changing world they live in, and he holds onto his memories and recollections like a dying man.

He can’t deny it, even if he can’t hear it yet. He is dying. Every day he’s closer to hearing the call. And what do dying men do? They remember. They see with clarity the moments once blurry. At last, they understand.

Perhaps he’s inspired by Morrigan’s words in the letter, tell me everything. He will, eventually, when he has a clearer mind to pen all his thoughts. For now, he’d rather remember what it was like before, when she was just the dream woman made real. He’d rather remember. And, picking up a worn leather journal with only the briefest of notes, thinking perhaps Kieran will find it one day, he begins to write.

He always loved words.


	2. Came darkly the witch

Rowan was fully aware of his bad habits and imperfections. He was brash, foolish at times, rushed into things before thinking, and the bulk of his decisions were made out of spite. Bizarrely, one of his weaker sins often became brought up the most by friends and confidents, his sin of vanity.

True, he took pride in his appearance. As he matured into his later teenage years, he would often fix his wavy, golden hair when he got a view of himself in a mirror, and he would only settle for the most luxurious cloth, and he always left his top two buttons loose. His penchant for velvet would be the death of him, as his mother would say. Howe called him “woman-like,” that way, though he didn’t understand how caring about one’s appearances was something only women thought of. He liked his reflection, was pleased at his looks, even the less conventionally carved, broader nose he had. It was something he had to learn, as he was often mocked for looking different than his family. His brother was dark hair and dark, sunken intense eyes, while Rowan was lighter, lankier, willowier. (And what made him more deadly in battle—he could out outmaneuver.) Clothes were no different than costumes. They said much about his character.

Yet at Ostagar, when Duncan asked if he needed anything and Rowan asked, “you got a mirror?” the reflection the mirror delivered troubled him. His normally swept back golden hair was scraggly and he had no desire to comb it back (if the place even had a comb) and his green eyes weren’t their usual bright, but dull and weathered. He was clean-shaven when he first met Duncan, but his beard, a touch darker than his hair, began to grow. He looked haggard and worn, his eyes dark and purple, and he was. Daveth still called him a pretty boy.

“Indeed,” Rowan replied after he met him.

“Surprised you aren’t offended,” Daveth replied.

Rowan shrugged. “Why should I be?”

King Cailan, who struck Rowan as someone who would have been happier in the Province Players than king, told him when he first arrived that his brother was out scouting, but Howe would hang and pay for what happened. He didn’t look forward to delivering the news, but felt it was akin to pulling out an arrow: the sooner it was done, the better. Still, thinking of telling him about his wife and his son especially…Rowan couldn’t fathom it. But they could have held each other as they cried together. Surely with his brother, Rowan could finally cry. He roamed for too long at Ostagar, hoping Fergus would return from whatever Maker knew what, but too much time passed, and the longer Rowan stood with nothing to do, the more he thought of his mother and father. Then larger thoughts skimmed to the smaller, like the brisk walk he always took from the main hall to his room, or the taste of Nan’s porridge in the morning. Nothing made him want to get up in the early morning save the promise of Nan’s cooking. He wouldn’t be surprised if he fell asleep that night and didn’t even wake up the next morning, because there was no porridge to look forward to, and maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.

He refused to dwell on those thoughts. His parents wouldn’t have wanted that.

Into the wilds he went, finding himself leading the party, even over the Grey Warden Alistair, who was supposed to accompany the three recruits on their task. The annoyance Rowan felt at becoming the designated leader into the wilds began the first trappings of their relationship. As his journey continued he would find himself frustrated at Alistair, the son of the king, who didn’t easily take to leadership. Of course they both had a few things to learn, and they grew up together, learned from one another, though that came much later in Rowan’s world. At the very least initially, Rowan realized they had a similar sense of humor, though he couldn’t find it in him to make jokes about the Blight bringing people together yet, all to do with his tender situation. Any other circumstance, he would have laughed during their first meeting, agree that indeed, the Blight was bringing people together. If Alistair knew Rowan’s situation, and Rowan suspected he did, he kept quiet about it and spoke highly of the Wardens, as if the Wardens were supposed to be his new home that could replace what he lost, and he would be happy with it.

He didn’t know it, but he found home only a little later. Morrigan was in the wilds, watching the party in animal form before she revealed herself. She truly wasn’t so far from a sneaky witch thief, as Alistair later called her. She stole his heart.

* * *

And this, Rowan thinks as he taps his quill against his journal, is where he is unsure of what to write or how to even write it. He certainly knew there was something about her since he first heard her voice of leather and strange melodies, but he couldn’t predict the life they’d share in their later lives. Writing of his family’s death brought back the old pangs of despair, but coming to his first meeting with Morrigan, he finds it is easy to write of tragedy, oddly enough, and easier still to act in a tragedy. In his brief tenure with the Province Players, his grand death scene at the end of Hamnet cleansed him almost, purged his ill feelings and allowed him to weep for himself in the guise of a fictional being. Acting in love was also a challenge, especially before Morrigan.

Writing of love. That’s the toughest of all. Especially for Morrigan, as she would prefer little theatrics and grandeur for a woman who was typically all theatrics and grandeur. Who else would deign an entrance to four armed men with a well, well, well, what have we here?

Rowan however prefers grandeur. So he continues on, with feeling.

* * *

When Morrigan revealed herself to the party as Rowan looked for the missing treaties Duncan was sure would be there, she called him a handsome lad, perhaps more drawn to him than the others, as Rowan didn’t back away at her presence. Instead he moved closer toward her. His first thoughts of her were not of her appearance—much to her later dismay, though there was something about the haphazard way her dark hair was pulled up, the mismatched feel of her clothes (and so little clothes as well, considering the chill.) and her mulberry stained eyes and lips that compelled him. He grew up seeking finery, a norm for everyone in his immediate circle. This woman radically defied all social conventions and cues.

He was interested. If not sexually, not yet anyway, then enigmatically.

Her voice compelled most of all. “You may call me Morrigan,” she said after he gave her his name. He never heard such a contralto, and when he asked who took the treaties, and if she could take the group to the one who removed it, she said, “I like you.”

 _If only you knew then Morrigan_ , Rowan writes. _If only you knew._

If only Rowan knew he would one day kill for the woman, but only a week earlier Rowan could never imagine where his life would end up. Even Flemeth, yet another legend his life has let him cross paths with, told him so much about him was uncertain.

He didn’t disagree. “Is that so terrible?” he asked. “One should never be certain of anything, save love.”

Flemeth raised her brows, “A romantic,” she called him. “That is unusual, for the Wilds.”

Morrigan watched him curiously. Her eyes never left him, he noted, but their gazes did eventually lock, his green on her strange, amber-yellow like eyes, that were akin to a hawk. He read once that mages sometimes had the most vibrant eyes, part of the way magic manifested itself. He never met a mage before, save one. She was his friend Kira, and she was Nan’s daughter. One day they were playing outside, sparring with sticks when fire erupted from her hands. How his mother fretted over him after. He could have been injured, or worse she said. He didn’t understand it at the time, as he wasn’t hurt and the fire never came close to him. But before he could talk to Kira about it, the templars took her away.

He thought briefly of Kira, resident of the Circle at Kinloch Hold ever since. Who would tell her now what happened, he wondered briefly.

But Morrigan and her mother, they had never lived inside a Circle. Such a place seemed unfathomable for both, but Morrigan especially, who had an innate wildness that seemed ill suited for such confined places. He heard rumors of the Circle at Kinloch, a large tower as it was built on Lake Calenhad, only one entrance. Morrigan defied those confines, in fact she defied every confine Rowan was used to.

He was already compelled. This fact compelled him further.

He couldn’t fathom it any longer, as now they had their treaties and they had to return to Duncan. At her mother’s behest, Morrigan led the group through the Wilds back to Ostagar. When they found themselves back on a familiar path, Alistair and the others headed back past the gate to the ruins without issue, without a care that they wouldn’t see the woman again, as she unnerved them so. Rowan however lagged behind, much to Morrigan’s amusement.

“What are you staring at, I wonder?” she asked, and he kept it to himself that he could have said the same thing about her. “Your people are waiting for you.”

Indeed they were. Alistair stared from across the way, motioning him to arrive. Daveth and Ser Jory stared as well, shifting and uncomfortable.

He held up one finger, a silent _wait._ Indeed, they could wait.

“Well?” Morrigan asked, “will you go to your people now? Dare I remind you are a guest?”

“I wouldn’t refer to them as ‘my people,’ you know,” Rowan said, and then more quietly, “I didn’t choose to be here.”

She cocked her head. “And where would you choose, handsome lad?”

He thought of home, after his vanity permitted a brief indulgence in thinking about what she said again, handsome lad, but home was his family and his family was gone. He couldn’t dream of anything else.

“Anywhere,” he replied. “I’d travel. I’d be myself, unbound.”

“And aren’t you yourself already?”

“Perhaps relatively speaking,” he said, enjoying this game of words on a stage he would never suspect he would have. “My name is Rowan, and apparently whatever I was before no longer matters, as I am to be a Grey Warden. But beyond that….”

He shrugged, over-exaggerating and theatrical, as was his way. She chuckled in the faintest of ways for her little show that the others weren’t privy to. It stung that this would perhaps be the last time he saw her, but with battle coming after a joining ceremony that pertained matters he knew not of, he knew he had to leave. It was time. However, Rowan was never one to part ways like a barbarian without manners, especially since Morrigan had kindly shown them the way out of the wilds. He extended his hand.

She didn’t take it as he thought she would. Rather she stared at his open palm with bemusement, insisted she would not shake his hand.

“You mistook me,” he assured, cheeks aflame—though he recovered quickly from his social gaff. “I meant to kiss your hand in farewell.”

“Different,” she commented.

“I am, if you haven’t noticed.”

With some trepidation, she placed her hand in his. He waited a moment for her to take it back. She didn’t. Like a knight kissing the land of his lady, Rowan pressed his lips to the top of her hand. Her skin was warm against his lips. It was a tragically brief kiss, their first, but her eyes never left his.

“Farewell Lady Morrigan,” Rowan bade, returning her hand. “I thank you for what you have done.”

“Lady,” she repeated, amused, bewildered, eyes dancing. “You have come from far away.”

He thought of home, and his family. He thought of the actors he spent his youth with, and the books he read that took him places far away from Highever. “I come from everywhere,” he said, because it was what made the most sense. Later she would tell him she too read many books in her youth, read stories that took her far away from the Wilds. She would tell him he amused and intrigued her, and she was not lying when she called him handsome. He reminded her of illustrations of far off kings in those novels who rode to battle with their men. She was a reader too, a dreamer. He loved that about her.

If he recollected Morrigan to resemble the dream woman from before, he quickly forgot as he rejoined the group, Alistair telling him he was lucky Morrigan didn’t change her mind about him and turn him into a frog.

“You perhaps,” Rowan replied. “Not me. She likes me.”

  
“I wonder for how long,” Alistair said, and in Rowan’s recollections, which are not bound by the confines of time, Rowan wrote in his pages, “a long, long, time.”

* * *

He closes his journal. He remembers the joining well, and remembers the battle that followed. But the joining must be kept secret and depictions of the battle of Ostagar are already too well recorded.

And Rowan isn’t interested in what they already know. He’s more interested in the time in between, and the love story that occurred.

Kissing her hand upon a first meeting. Older Rowan chuckles at his youthful guile, a guile he would still have to this day if he met Morrigan in Tevinter searching for a cure to the Calling rather than Ferelden. Truly, a picturesque beginning, not something he could say for all their time together.

He doesn’t want it any other way.


	3. With Pools of Water

It was a gargantuan task: unite Ferelden and use the treaties to build an army against the oncoming darkspawn, all the while knowing one of the most important and influential people in the country, Loghain, was not only against him, but was in an alliance with the man that slayed his kin. He must have read a novel like this once, but now Rowan was the de facto protagonist of his own novel. If he had it his way he’d comb the Wilds, comb Ostagar for Fergus as not even a supporting character, but background soldier trying to do what was right. But as Morrigan said outside of Lothering, he’d either find his brother alive or not at all. He wasn’t the side character, he was thrust into the role of the protagonist in this grand adventure story, and it was time to start writing.

“Kind words to say to a grieving man,” Rowan muttered, crossing his arms before they made their way into the town. “I lost my family, my dog, and my brother is nowhere to be found. And now I am settled with uniting a divided land. Only a small feat, I am sure.”

She appeared taken aback at his biting tongue, blinking as if she didn’t realize how much the truth could hurt. In his own truth, he didn’t mean to sound harsh. He even almost tried to apologize, until she said it herself.

“I did not mean to sound…harsh,” she offered, unsure in her words. “I only meant…”

“I know,” Rowan replied. “I should step up. That’s what Grey Wardens do after all.”

Walking through Lothering with it’s overfull chantry and children begging for their parents, Rowan despaired, with the simplest lack of coin taking him over the edge. He wanted to buy his companions a drink, a new set of armor, anything…but he couldn’t. But when he asked his small party if he should take up the job listing posted on the chanter’s board, he was met with a despondent “ehh” from Alistair and a blank stare from Morrigan. He took the jobs because they had to eat, taking care of bandits and finding lost parents, but nothing was worse than the giant spiders. He rushed into the stream nearby after one secreted on him, throwing his family’s sword and shield to the bank along with his shoes. He used to run into water as a boy and then later as a teenager when he should have known better. Where was his mother to tell him to come out, he’d catch a cold? Where was Hahaku who would run into the water with him?

As it turned out, nearer than he thought.

He thought he lost Hahaku at Ishal—he didn’t even dare ask Morrigan if her mother had thought to save him as she saved Alistair or himself. He privately mourned as best he could on the road to Lothering, one of his best and dearest friends, but as Hahaku ran to him in the water, consequently sopping mud and water everywhere, Rowan didn’t care. He knelt and offered him so many pets and back scratches, practically crying with joy that surely Morrigan and Alistair thought him a fool if they didn’t already. When he reemerged from the water with Hahaku he properly introduced Morrigan to his faithful companion, so named after a story he used to be told in his youth of a hound named Hahaku.

Alistair kneeled, welcoming him back, but Morrigan did no such thing. She turned up her nose, thinking he was ridden with mangy fleas, but Rowan saw a glimmer of something that wasn’t entirely disgust in her eyes, even as she informed him he was muddy and dirty, his hair more brown than blonde from the mud.

“Well,” Rowan said, heading back to the water to wash off the mud, “I wouldn’t want to spend that valuable coin we just earned on a bath…”

As he dunked water over his head, he vaguely caught her from the corner of his eye. From his vantage point in Tevinter far removed from the moment outside Lothering, Rowan remembers every step Morrigan took to him like a well performed dance. Before heading into the water, she removed scarf upon scarf until only the binding that covered her breasts remained, and something told him that had Alistair not been there, she would have removed that as well. She liked his eyes upon her, and she wanted him to know, because she moved like she knew he watched. She was right—though he tried not to as she headed into thigh deep water as she undid her hair from the haphazard tie. It was longer than he first realized, unkemptly beautifully in the way it spilled far behind her back. Then she lifted water from the stream and gently poured it over her head, stretching and exposing her neck, letting the water gather down, and then down further, her rough spun garments of black and dark purple clinging to her skin.

He watched from the corner of his eye, feeling his cheeks grow hot. How much of me did she see as she tended to me in her mother’s hut? He wondered suddenly. Maker, he hoped it was all of him. He wanted it to be all of him, this beautiful temptress, witch of the wilds.

He was in an adventure book. But he was also in another book, one where she made the rules, one with many happy endings.

He gulped as she returned to the bank, pining her hair up again to her standard messy updo. He quickly finished cleaning himself, returning to the bank to put his shoes back on. Hahaku licked his damp leg. She didn’t say anything more—in fact she was rather unpleasant in a lot of ways, disapproving at Rowan’s desire to “fix every useless squabble in the village,” and most egregiously, making sure the lost child, whose mother he was sure by their matching hair was the one they found passed in Lothering’s field, found his way into the chantry. “Tender heart,” she called him in an almost mocking tone, and he steadfastly replied he’d rather have that sin than any other.

“Would you want to be weak?” She threw at him before they entered the tavern, hoping for some news and a drink after running, doing tasks for the chanter’s board.

“If you think love is a weakness, I feel sorry for you,” Rowan told her, and she said no more.

* * *

They met with some of Loghain’s men in the tavern—Rowan’s bravado akin the hero of many guiles that he read about in stories, informing the men to deliver a message to Loghain: no, you didn’t kill all the Wardens, think again. Look out. Of course it never came to any fruition, Rowan never knew what became of the messengers or his message. For all he knew, Loghain would have sent Zevran anyway with or without the message. Morrigan of course critiqued his decision, as was her standard, though Alistair thought nothing of it. Leliana however, his newest companion, approved.

Leliana. Rowan’s quill drags across the page without any words as he thinks of her. They’ve written on and off since she became the Divine’s left hand. She even lied to the Right Hand Cassandra for him, pretending she had no clue where he was. He’ll forever be in debt for it. _She doesn’t think it’s a coincidence Hawke and the Warden have disappeared,_ Leliana wrote him not too long ago. _If you ask me, the writer Varric knows about Hawke._ Indeed, Rowan knew her to be right, from the Champion’s brother.

In the years that have transpired, Leliana has changed like he has, but while Rowan and Morrigan have become quieter and humbler, Leliana’s edges have sharpened. In many ways the two of them made a modicum of sense—more sense than he and Morrigan, but the truth was he never felt anything more for Leliana than friendship, siblinghood even. Even if she was older, he sensed her youthful idealism, and how much she gave when she considered someone a friend. He would not squander it.

He smirks. Morrigan was jealous the moment she met Leliana, the moment Rowan smiled at her and told her “we need all the help we can get, welcome aboard.”

 _Dear,_ he writes from his vantage point, _it was always you._

* * *

Before becoming a Warden, his dreams, even if he did try to apply meaning to them, were scattered and fragmented. His dream woman, who he began to think of as Morrigan after they made camp that night after leaving Lothering, was the most corporeal. Vampirically drinking the darkspawn blood intensified his dreams, made a dreamlike fall from a great height hurt more than it should have, and a roar from the archdemon more piercing to the ear. When he finally gave up the rest of his sleep in the early morning Alistair comforted him. It happened to him as well.

“We’re in this together then?” Rowan asked.

Truthfully Rowan was merely pointing out their shared kinship in being a Warden, but Alistair mistook it for a sarcastic quip at his lack of leadership and control when it came to making decisions on where to head next. He wasn’t like Rowan who grew up with responsibility. Alistair trained as a templar and was expected to follow orders in the ranks.

“I wasn’t exactly raised for leadership. That was my brother,” Rowan said. “Heir and the spare. I happen to be the spare. I spent more time in my youth reciting Willard and Morganstern than training with a sword and shield—though I hope you saw earlier I’m not too bad with them. In fact, I’m as good as you I hope.”

Ah, but Rowan did know something or other about diplomacy from his family. Flattery was one such lesson he knew all to well. It worked, Alistair thanked him, so he used the opening to bring up what he knew ailed his comrade in arms. He asked Alistair about Duncan.

As it turned out, the man that Rowan somewhat resented for pulling him away from his duty was Alistair’s savior from the templars. He looked up to the man as a surrogate father. If Rowan could not share Alistair’s kindship, he could understand.

“Have you lost anyone any one important to you?” Alistair asked suddenly, and Rowan, sighing, replied it was only his entire family.

All the color drained from Alistair’s face. “I—I’m so sorry. I should have remembered. I—”

“It’s alright,” Rowan assured. “Grief keeps you in the clouds.”

They talked a little more, Rowan assuring he just wanted to know they wouldn’t be enemies and they’d be able to work together. Indeed truly the only friendly person in his party so far was Leliana. The night before when they made camp, she openly talked to him about everything save why she left Orlais. She talked more about her dream and her time in the chantry, how she helped the people there, and the beautiful rose that inspired her. She also asked about him, and Rowan told her about his time spent with the Province Players, his greatest performances that he gladly offered snippets of when Leliana asked. (“Today, I die as I am,” he recited, some of the final lines from one of his favorite plays. Leliana giddily clapping.) They talked for some time, though when Rowan tried to talk to Sten, the Qunari they released,) he rebuffed all of Rowan’s questions. And Morrigan…

Her dance near the water, her act of pouring cups of water down her hair made him think perhaps she had taken a likening to him. After they made camp however, she lent her magical talents to the fire, keeping it burning and bright with a twitch of her fingers before setting up her own tent away from the group. She did though turn to look at him before she left, and truly Rowan almost followed, until something told him to leave her alone and give her the privacy she was likely used to. He had other companions he needed to tend to.

He turned to look at her tent. She was awake, standing in front of it with her own fire. Alistair mentioned, quite casually, that Rowan seemed to like her. He looked at her often, and she did the same.

“What are your plans with her?” Alistair asked suddenly. “Flemeth wanted her to come, but she didn’t seem happy. In fact, I don’t think she has been happy since leaving the Wilds.”

“I have no plans,” Rowan replied. “If she wants to remain then I’d welcome it. We need all the help we can get. But if she wants to leave,” but Maker he hoped not, “I won’t stop her.”

“You both look at each other like Satinalia dinner. And in the wilds you kissed her hand.”

“Tis what a brave and gallant knight does,” Rowan said, mimicking his lady’s speech patterns.

His lady. Maker. And Alistair noticed it too.

He sighed. “Well, don’t forget about the rest of us, alright?”

The tone was teasing. Victorious with at least one more friend, Rowan decided he may as well, and rose to meet her, ask how she was.

“My lady,” he said to her as he stood by her side. “How are you this morning?”

She didn’t react to “my lady,” but she did mutter “surprising,” at his presence.

“What’s so surprising? I want to check on my brothers, and sisters in arms.”

“From last night. ’twoud seem you have favorites,” she said with indifference. “’tis shocking you aren’t over there, with that girl.”

“Leliana?”

Morrigan didn’t reply. “Don’t be like that, water dancer,” he advised, crossing his arms. And when the epithet perplexed her, he remained firm. “Yes, water dancer,” he stated, glancing into her eyes.

“Isn’t that what you were yesterday?”

“You seemed to enjoy the water. I merely thought I see for myself.”

She was being coy and they both knew it. Her smirk betrayed her.

“You move like a cat,” he said, changing the tactic. “Graceful.”

Her eyes swept over him, and she offered the subtlest compliment, that he moved with bravado. Tales were told of Grey Warden endurance, and he was his own tale himself, not disappointing in the slightest.

“I wouldn’t want to be a tale,” he said. “I want to be real.”

“Am I?”

He smirked. “I’m not sure. You come from a book…a witch of the wilds. You come from a dream.”

He didn’t mean to say that, but he did and he wouldn’t take it back, even as she asked, “your dream?”

There was no use lying. “If you ever would want to be there, I’d allow it.”

With victory, she smiled, and he suspected she knew exactly who his favorite was.


	4. Sailing to Somewhere

In Redcliffe, things between the Witch of the Wilds and the man she would soon call an errant, story book night deepened. It didn’t however mean they didn’t quarrel. In some ways they always quarreled, but age makes Rowan know he wouldn’t have it any other way between them. If she didn’t fight him sometimes, he wouldn’t think it true love.

Back to those years ago when they were young, Rowan continues to write. Taking Alistair’s advice, he decided to head to Redcliffe. Little did he know he and his party would be leaving from one disarrayed city to the next. He had been to Redcliffe once as a boy, met Arl Eamon and Teagan in fact, and a fuzzy memory he had no inkling of until Alistair mentioned his own history with the arl resurfaced.

“You were the boy with the golem doll in the corner of the hall!” Rowan exclaimed on their way to the city, though Alistair shushed him. He had no desire for the rest of the party to know he had a golem doll. (“Oh, I had one too,” Rowan retorted.) From there, he didn’t think much of what Alistair said about Eamon raising him until they were in Redcliffe’s outskirts, and Alistair informed Rowan, and consequently the rest of the party, that he was raised by Arl Eamon before being sent to the templars because he was Maric’s son, consequently Cailan’s brother, and consequently the heir to the throne.

“Let’s hope not,” Alistair said when Rowan mentioned it. “The very ideas terrifies me.”

“Surprises me not.”

He loved the sound of her voice, from the moment he first heard it. However, traveling with her for a bit of time, he knew her biting remarks that often accompanied the remarks.  
These remarks didn’t end at one biting quip. “Would you even be fit if it came to it? What with you leave the leading to your Grey Warden companion,” she said. “One wonders why.”

“Could you not right now?” Alistair asked, voice hard. “I was raised a commoner. You were raised a clown.”

“Me, a clown?” She laughed mellifluously. “’Tis amusing we have a dog in the party and you are still—”

“Enough.” Rowan held his hand up, silencing both. “We will not be doing this, not right now. We will be going to the city Redcliffe, and we will hopefully find Eamon and alive and well, and we will be on our way.”

They were not on their way, not anytime soon. Talking to Teagan in the chantry revealed the dire situation of corpses reanimating and walking to life every night, and it prevented Teagan and his soldiers from entering the castle where Eamon and his family was. Many of Redcliffe’s soldiers were still at Ostagar, dead or displaced, and Rowan and his companions were there, able-bodied, formidable, and could lend a hand against the undead come night.

Rowan was never the one who settled in-fighting and squabbles between Highever’s soldiers and retinues. It was either his father or his brother, and walking through Redcliffe, he garnered a new appreciation for what they had to do. It was one problem after the other—and they all had problems, the quartermaster, the bar keep, the knights, the crying girl in the chantry who was looking for her brother. Because no one else would, Rowan agreed to find the girl’s brother Bevin, moved by her tears as he was, and when he found him looking for his grandfather’s sword, he gave it to Rowan, because he “looked like a knight from the story books,” and could put it to good use.

“Not so much,” Rowan said. “But thank you.”

He gave the sword to Alistair, as he was already equipped with his family blade, assuring they would give it back after the battle. From there they climbed up to the tavern, Rowan hoping to gauge morale. He certainly didn’t find what he wanted in the dimly lit place—a lot of sullen soldiers with makeshift weapons down their backs that were in need of repairs. Even the serving girl, who introduced herself as Bella, was in ill-spirits.

“It’s worse now, with soldiers not coming back after the night,” she said with melancholy. “All they want is ale before the night.”

“You’d think they should be drunk before battle?” Leliana asked.

“I was drunk these past three nights,” one of the older soldiers replied, hearing her comment. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Indeed, Rowan was tipsy before his first tourney. He kept it to himself however.

“It’s always been this way,” Bella said with a sigh. “Before all this…well…”

She looked to the ground. “What’s wrong?” Rowan asked.

Lloyd mistreated her, he said, and paid her next to nothing. He couldn’t have that.

He found himself along the side of the bar, motioning Lloyd for a mead and slapping down the bit of silver. When he handed him the glass, Rowan took a casual sip—certainly not worth the price Lloyd charged—before setting it down with a small clack against the wood. He looked Lloyd straight in the eye.

“Something wrong?” Lloyd asked, cleaning a glass.

“Pay your workers better and stop groping them. The mead is also dull swill.

Lloyd went pale, asking what on earth Rowan meant. At that point, he was done playing games. Moving around the other side of the bar, Lloyd backing up, he grabbed the collar of his shirt until his ale sodden breath was in Rowan’s face and large belly was flush against Rowan. He squirmed but Rowan kept him there, enjoying it more than he should have.

“Pay your workers,” he repeated, carefully emphasizing each syllable. “And stop groping them. And while I’m here, shouldn’t you be with the soldiers?”

“B—Bann Teagan said we didn’t have to!”

“Do I look like Bann Teagan to you? Go you coward, see what it’s like to defend the women you respect so much.”

When Bella was put in charge of the tavern, ale was on the house. Not only that, but she came to Rowan’s side and threw her arms around him, bestowing him with a kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are a gallant knight. Thought men like you only existed in stories.”

He would admit it: he liked the kiss. He felt seen, he felt like he made a difference, and after everything it was something he needed. But he saw Morrigan’s face after, her stare blank and cold. “I can’t believe you let her touch you,” she said with a defeatist sigh once they were outside the tavern. “Surely, you will help every woman in this village, won’t you? And you’d let every single one kiss you. Foolish, foolish boy.”

He didn’t like being called a boy by her. He should have thought she would think him a man. And yet her ire grew after Rowan promised the blacksmith that he would find his daughter. Her voice, dripping with sarcasm, asked if now he will attempt to rescue kittens from trees.

At this point, Rowan had no shame. Once outside the blacksmith’s, Rowan took Morrigan’s hand, leading her out by the water. He held up his hand to Alistair, Leliana and Sten, promising it would be one moment, and one moment only.

“Yes?” she asked, with a dollop of sugary sweetness

He didn’t play games. “Why are you acting like this?”

“Why are you?” she fired back. “We are here for the Arl, not to save the entire village."

“Look around,” he told her. “Who will help these people if I do not?”

“Yet to accept a kiss? From that woman? Shall we keep our list? Leliana, that girl in the chantry, the tavern wench…me….”

He didn’t care if Alistair, Leliana, and Sten were all watching. “You know what I feel for you is different,” he muttered.

“Oh? Is it?”

“Shall I kiss you now to prove it?”

“But I do wonder if you would, gallant knight from a story book? You—”

He took her hand and pulled their bodies closer together, her words disappearing. “Am I a knight, or rogue?” he asked her. “No. I’m a Grey Warden.”

She bit her lip, mesmerized by his. Oh, to have done it then before battle, in front of his companions.

It was a nice thought, but it wasn’t what he wanted.

“I won’t kiss you now,” he said, “though a kiss before battle is what the bards sing of. I’d rather wait to kiss you when you aren’t so…salty. Kisses taste better that way.”

The temptress, Witch of the Wilds smiled, both agreeing with him, and knowing he did indeed want her lips and her lips alone. She stood by his side in battle, and then stood by his side come morning when the village remained. When Bella thanked him again after they came to the tavern with for complimentary glass of mead—a small reprieve before they would head to Castle Redcliffe— Morrigan said nothing and merely stood by his side, her arm pressed against his. When his mead sat untouched on the counter after a few sips, she took his glass and took a sip.

“I suppose I am to wait till after we storm the castle?” she asked.

“If I find a small grotto to take you. I hear kisses happen only in beautiful places.”

“Then we should do it anywhere you are.”

He flushed with vanity. He knew he looked tired, with dark, purplish circles under his eyes and scraggly hair that was growing out, though at least it had some wave to it. He lost weight as well, as his cheeks were hollower. His beard was growing as well, and he knew soon he would need to trim it. Frankly, he looked like what he was: a tired man who slept in the woods and was forced to settle every squabble in Redcliffe Village. And yet the Witch of the Wilds, who looked at radiant as she did when he first met her, would have him anywhere. She liked him as he was: tired and frankly annoyed.  
He took one last sip of mead before suggesting they meet Teagan. After that, he would be one step closer to his kiss.

Or, not.

* * *

After finding Connor at Redcliffe Castle, realizing Isolde had been protecting him, letting the village suffer…Rowan wanted nothing more for it to all end. But he would not kill a child, and he would not allow Jowan’s blood magic ritual to happen.

“She is more than willing to die,” Morrigan reminded. “The boy is right. It would be a good course of action.”

Rowan did consider Jowan’s suggestion, but he would not send her into the fade. Of that, he remained firm, though he did not tell her. Instead, he decided to do what Alistair suggested, go the Circle Tower.

“It’s a day’s journey from here,” Rowan said to Leliana and Sten. “Take Hahaku and stay here, in case there’s another attack.”

Sten grumbled, but promised he would protect the village, foolish as they all were. Leliana however, relented. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

Rowan shook his head. “You heard the rumors in Lothering. Something’s happening in the Circle, and Alistair was a templar and Morrigan is a mage. Besides, you are fierce with your bow. The undead won’t stand a chance.”

She smiled at his flattery, true as it was. “Alright. But, are you sure you can handle them?”

Rowan turned around. Morrigan and Alistair both had their arms crossed, both trying not to look at each other.

“Yes,” he said. “I can.”

“I’m sure you wish you’d rather be alone with the bog witch.”

It was Sten who quipped, much to Rowan’s surprise. Still, he could find certain humors in a few things, and he chuckled.

“I know and understanding timing,” Rowan assured. “And certainly, there will be more time.”

With three of them traveling, Teagan offered a solution to cut their traveling time, a sloop manned by a sailor named Jon, who agreed to take the small party across the lake.

“Jon B will take you across alright,” the redheaded and bearded sailor said, leaving Rowan to ask as he hopped in if he named the sail after himself.

“No,” he replied. “I added a B. Don’t you know all boats much have a B in their name?”

He prattled on about sails and sailing as they made it across the lake, Rowan between Alistair and Morrigan. Eventually Jon quieted, and Alistair managed to fall asleep, huddled on the boat’s floor. With one companion, the bastard prince asleep, Rowan observed the Witch of the Wilds, standing by the edge of the ship with her arms crossed, looking toward the water.

He stood near her, and she looked at him expectedly. He knew what she wanted, expected even, but he shook his head. “Sweet victory first,” he said. “Not as we’re sailing somewhere.” He did however, lean closer to her. “Do you like sailing Lady Morrigan? I always did when I was a boy.”

“’Tis charming, to a certain extent,” she replied, in just the right way that let him know she wasn’t charmed. “I prefer other ways of traveling. Flying, perhaps.”

“You can fly?”

“In the form of a raven,” she said. “Indeed, when I first saw you in the Wilds, a man with far more prowess than those he traveled with, I flew overhead and watched for some time.”

Compelled, he asked her what it was like to soar above. “The same as walking, after a while,” she said. “It feels freer however. Like you’re unbound, unchained.”

“So a bit like being with you?”

“Such flattery before a kiss,” she said with a sigh. “You’re different from most men. In so many ways.”

“Often I have been told,” he admitted. “And here, since you won’t prod and probe me for useless questions as I said you could, I’ll tell you a secret. When I was an actor, traveling—though mostly through Highever, as my mother and father would have hated to see their son as a traveling actor in Denerim—I thought of escaping with them to Orlais. I wanted to be free, I wanted to fly.”

She asked why he didn’t, and he told her the secret he never told anyone, not even old Nan who sometimes believed in visions. “I dreamed of a woman,” he said. “She kept me pinned to where I was. She held me, and I should have been frightened, and yet I felt safe. So I remained at Highever, trained to be a warrior.”

He thought she’d be impressed. She was anything but. “Men and their dream women,” she scoffed. “Perhaps you aren’t so different from most men.”

“And how are most men? You must have met many in the Wilds.”

“The chantry sends their templars sometimes,” she replied, proving his sarcastic retort wrong. “They think they should take me to their Circle, as if I am too weak willed and will allow a demon possession.”

“I’m sorry I’m taking you there now, though I assure I am no templar.”

“Forgiven,” she replied, returning to the subject at hand. “Men however, are willing to believe two things about women: one, she is weak, and two, she finds him attractive.”

“I only believe one of those.”

“And I would tell you, I know which one, and it is pleasing. Though I do believe you already knew what I thought of that matter. Now. Warden—”

“Rowan,” he replied. “My name is Rowan.”

“Rowan,” she repeated, and Maker he liked his name on her lips. “Rest now. You don’t have to sit here and try to win me further. You would have me already if you wanted.”

“I’d rather you come to me, first.”

Indeed, she did, and she came sooner than he thought. Yet for that moment, sailing to the Circle at Kinloch hold, the enjoyed the quiet on the water before the next storm. That was his life, living through the storms. And his Morrigan was the storm of the century.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading, I didn't expect a lot of traffic to this fic but I am loving writing Rowan and Morrigan and hope you all are enjoying! 
> 
> BTW, the ship "Jon B" is a slight homage to the song "Sloop John B," famously covered by the Beach Boys. 
> 
> Kisses will be soon, and more :) (there might be a rating change but that's still up in the air.)


	5. What Pleasures Taken

The woman with a marked hand, the Inquisitor, already carries a legendary status, particularly with her people at Skyhold who whisper of her bravery at Haven and the miracle of the commander finding her in the snow and bringing her back alive to them. When Morrigan met her however, she found her to be merely a woman.

Others would scoff at such base callings in referring to the Herald of Andraste as a mere woman. Not Morrigan. Rowan is too gentle for the stories they tell of him. The Inquisitor reminds, if only in that way. Nothing ever reminds of her Rowan other than Kieran. Other than his dark hair, passed from mother to son, Kieran is almost all Rowan.

“Lady Morrigan,” The Inquisitor greets, Morrigan diverting her attention from her book to the Lady Inquisitor. Morrigan greets her with her title, though she looks less Inquisitor and more lady of the forest and fields. She wears her long brown hair pinned away from her face, a white shirt that falls from her tanned shoulder blades with a gathered forest green skirt. Her real name that so few will know one day in favor of the mere title of “Inquisitor,” is Lydia Trevelyan, formally of the Ostwick Circle of Magi. From living at Skyhold for the fortnight she and Kieran have, Morrigan has gathered just as much about her personal life as she has status as Inquisitor, including her romantic inclinations. Rumors abound that she and the Commander of the Inquisition are tied together, though many remember how she confronted him about his past spent elsewhere before the Inquisition. 'Twas quite a show, according the serving girl Iona who attends to Morrigan. Almost all of Skyhold saw the confrontation in the very garden Morrigan now sits. But, they have seemed to have made up, somewhat. ‘Tis what Skyhold says, at any rate.

Such things about the Inquisitor Morrigan wouldn’t dare ask, though she recalls her and Rowan in those early days, their unwitting performances for everyone to see and comment upon. So many stories about her the Inquisitor, with so few of them the truth. So many as well about Rowan and Morrigan. The burden of duty.

She sits across from Morrigan, telling her that a few of Skyhold’s cooks have children as well if her son would like to meet them. “Perhaps,” Morrigan says, with enough skill in social graces learned at court to now know not outright refuse, though when the Inquisitor asks for forgiveness for not before asking of Kieran’s father, Morrigan offers the truth.

“I think he should stay as far away from Ferelden as possible,” she says simply. “Tis’ not safe for Wardens, though that is not the reason he remains away.”

“He’s the hero of Ferelden, isn’t he?”

Such games she could play, though she chooses not. Besides, she likes calling him hers.

“Oh.” The Inquisitor certainly didn’t expect the mystery woman to reveal such matters. Inwardly to herself, Morrigan accepts her satisfaction at what remains hidden and unsolved. Not everyone should dare know everything she believes.

“If not I that would tell, Leliana would,” she admits. “She knows well.”

The Inquisitor blushes. “Oh. Well. I have heard stories of him growing up is all.”

“Indeed. And some well tell stories of you, and that Commander of yours.”

Her blush deepens. “Uh, well. We’re not—”

“Ah. I suppose you cast glances at him in the war room because you admire the tailoring of his fur coat.”

“The coat isn’t so bad.”

She asks the Inquisitor not to lie. Finally agreeing, admitting she finds the coat too burly, she calls the Commander stubborn and obstinate before sighing, defeated. Morrigan remembers well those feelings of defeat. What is best is not to fight it, though the Inquisitor is a stubborn woman and displays annoyance at these intrusive thoughts. She’ll be like Morrigan was then. She’ll learn.

“He works hard,” the Inquisitor, Lydia, says of him. “Too hard.”

Morrigan has met him before. When their eyes first met at the Winter Palace he froze with fear and remembrances. She keeps it to herself, thinking perhaps the Commander has already told her, and thinking as well that some things should be only hers.

“Everyone is counting on me, thinks I’m more than I am.” Her blue eyes speak of sorrow. “I’m just a woman.”

“Then take a woman’s pleasure, Inquisitor, when you can,” Morrigan says. “The world will be unkind. ‘Tis up to you to find moments of quiet.”

“Are you happy with him?”

Her pride is strong. “I never thought I’d meet an equal in this life. And yet, he is mine. And Kieran’s.”

The Inquisitor blushes. Indeed, so few know of the burden of legend and myth, and her Rowan is one such who knows, far from home as he is. If he were here at Skyhold he’d tell the Inquisitor much the same—take pleasure where you can, indulge in the identity of self rather than how others will view you, how history will view you. Have a lover who will know the being underneath, possess the being underneath in only the most intimate of ways.

Morrigan believes not in souls, but she believes in beings. His body carries stains of her lips. And only the know just how deeply the stains run.

“Honeyed words shall make me vomit soon,” Morrigan says.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

She laughs, mellifluous. Rowan once said her laugh was music. She’s always believed in the things he said.

From the first, she saw the treasons planted.

* * *

After the battle of Ostagar, she had been scouting the battlefield, flying overhead before she arrived back to the Wilds. He wasn’t there, that Grey Warden of hers who came from a story book. Perhaps he was far smarter than that man they called King and knew a certain victory wouldn’t come. ‘Twas what she thought of him anyway—he had wisely been the most polite of all the men that traveled to her Wilds.

When she arrived back home, adjusting back to her human form as she always did and still does when she changes shape, Mother told her what happened and how she brought two Grey Wardens to their home. _Go take care of that handsome lad of yours,_ Mother bade. _Don’t you dare read my thoughts_ , Morrigan asked in turn, and Mother replied, _your thoughts are mine dear girl,_ as if Morrigan didn’t already know.

_Oh but he is handsome. Shall you bed him as well, add him to your list?_

As she rebandaged his wounds, spread poultices where fire had broken through his leather armor, Morrigan recalled his earlier demeanor in the Wilds. He led his party skillfully—determined and even belligerent at their incompetency and fear, and yet when he met her he seemed another man entirely, gentle and ready to recite a book of poems memorized for her benefit. Being up close to him, with nothing better to do than observe as she worked, he was younger than she at first gleaned—even younger than herself, if by only three years at most. Men like him had wandered into her midst before, but there were no other men quite like him.

He woke when she was gone. Part of her still wishes she were there when he did—surely his thunderstruck expression at the healing Witch of the Wilds would have struck her with awe. ‘Twas unfortunate enough he woke after his companion, as ‘twoud have been more fortunate had Alistair been the one that remained unconscious. Yet when Rowan did wake, he did something she never would have dreamed. He thanked her.

She was at a loss for words, just as she was when he promised he would protect her as the boat sailed and docked to Kinloch Hold.

“You say that as if I cannot protect myself,” she chided. “More templars than either you or especially that fool Alistair can count have come to my Wilds. Who sent them away, you think?”

“I do not speak to insinuate you cannot protect yourself,” he said. “I know you can. I’ve seen it. All I mean to say is that I am here, I will support you. Though it matters not, I am sure we will be in and out.” He grinned. “And I’ll try to find that Grimoire of yours, I promise.”

What fools they were in those early days to expect something was running as smoothly as it always had. Kinloch was no different. Abominations had taken over the tower, the Knight Commander explaining to Rowan the Rite of Annulment had been sent for. They were awaiting word from Denerim as they spoke.

“You’d do that?” Rowan demanded. Even then he was unafraid to challenge. “You’d trap all the mages? Some must still live.”

“My templars as well,” the Knight Commander said. “And if any are alive, they are shielded by the Maker Himself.”

“We’re going in. We will find the missing mages.”

Alistair argued not, she argued not, bravado getting the better of her. She thought herself better than those in the Tower. She had evaded the templars well enough on her own, as her mother stopped helping her long ago. Those inside who had not evaded as she had were weak. She no longer believes what she used to believe.

Before they entered the tower proper, before the doors closed, they ran into a mage. She called Rowan by his name, and Rowan rushed over to her, embraced her, even lifted her off her feet, her long blonde hair caught in his hands. “What happened to you?” she asked. “Rowan, I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Oh Kira it would take ages to tell you,” he said, his hands on her shoulders. “Arl Howe betrayed our family and I’m a Grey Warden now…and oh it matters not. I’m here to save the mages.”

“Mum? Is Mum alright?”

He shook his head and they embraced again, Morrigan racked with that same shiver of rage she felt whenever he talked to that redheaded Chantry sister, when that wench in the tavern kissed his cheek.

“And who is that I wonder?” Morrigan asked as they passed through the tower door.

Alistair stared at the door behind him, just then shut with a loud thud. “You don’t care that we just got locked in?”

A childhood friend, Rowan explained. She was his nanny’s daughter, and when her magic manifested she was sent away.

“A lover, I wonder,” Morrigan pondered. Well, from the first, she knew he was trouble.

His eyes narrowed. “We were ten Morrigan.”

“Can we please move onto the task at hand?”

Alistair had always been thoroughly insensible, lest it was about Rowan and herself. Oh, how he always hated the two of them together—despised that what could have been a charming friendship between two men was complicated by a sorceress and Witch of the Wilds. How Rowan had to dote upon him far more than he doted upon Morrigan in the Tower—and a former templar to top it off.

“It could have been me,” Alistair kept saying as they crossed body after body—mage and templar alike. “If I wasn’t recruited…”

“But it is not you.” Morrigan reminded. “We are alive.”

She recalled Rowan did not see the aftermath of the battle at Ostagar. He also led Redcliffe’s soldiers to victory with well placed fire and soldiers at certain pivot points, but the tower was another matter entirely. She told him not to look at the faces twisted in shock and pain—he had to stand strong. For Alistair and the mage in their party that joined them, Wynne. How Wynne never warmed to her, and Rowan in his infuriating ways had to comfort her when the woke up from the fade. Not Morrigan, who prided herself in waking as he did when they were brought by Sloth, who told him again not to fret about her. She was strong and suited to take care of herself. ‘Tis merely what she had to do, what she always had to do. Rowan too, proved he could do what he had to. What was more, he could do it without shedding the blood of innocents. It puzzled her, as someone who took the easiest path. At first.

“Do not try to speak to him,” Morrigan said to Rowan after the Knight Commander declared the tower safe from abominations, and Rowan was finally able to do what he intended to do all along when he came to Kinloch, and ask for help in the matters of a possession in Redcliffe. She referred of course to the trapped templar they ran across before Uldred, the man Morrigan now knew as the Commander of the Inquisition.

“He sees what he wants,” she said of him then. “He is haunted. Little to be done by your hand.”

“I feel sorry for him,” Rowan said. “I—well, my father fought in war, and he often told me he…relived his memories. I have been reliving memories as well. I suppose I wanted to say that I understand.”

“Will it be enough?” she asked. “’Tis difficult to say.”

He sighed. “Probably not.”

Once outside the tower, Rowan offering that girl he claimed was no more than a friend one last embrace, and that Circle mage, Wynne, suspiciously eyeing her form up and down, Morrigan saw Rowan clutch at his arm as they landed back by the dock.

“A burn,” Wynne called it, Rowan tossing his sword and shield onto the grass, tossing himself there as well and plopping himself down. “I can heal it.”

Morrigan scoffed. “No. I shall.”

She sat by his side and he raised his eyebrows as she ripped at his already torn shirt, revealing the pink and red burn marks. She rummaged through her knapsack for what she searched—a balm, and Rowan grimaced when it the hit the burn. She wrapped one palm around his forearm, the other rubbed gently at the wound.

“I suppose you did this for the burn on my abdomen,” he said.

“You are correct.”

He licked his lips as she held on longer than she should have—but he had strong arms that held a sword well, and who wouldn’t have been a little curious? Still, she hid her delight, her frissons—same ones she had when she tended to him at her Mother’s hut, same ones when she lifted his shirt and saw the coarse, blonde hair that disappeared beneath his breaches.

“Morrigan—"

“Do not carelessly charge at a mage,” she advised. “’Tis unwise, and foolish.”

He smiled. “I have known to be foolish.”

“I know it well, Warden.”

“But…”

He pulled something out of his own knapsack, and she knew it immediately. Her mother’s grimoire. He smiled, proud of himself, and she put it away with plans to read later. Though, she had other, better plans for later, and she suspected he would be willing. She saw it in his eyes.

They made it back to Redcliffe, Morrigan thinking of it—what she had been thinking of since the Wilds. It was good he warmed to her already. It would make it easier. She didn’t expect he’d stay such a storybook either, but he came, he stayed, he smiled, and she would answer. She’d enjoy. Too much maybe, and yet it wouldn’t be enough.

An older Morrigan now, sitting with the Inquisitor, thinks of her younger self looking at younger Rowan. What fool she was, most of all, to have such plans drift and fade away. Do not run from it, she would tell her younger self. Enjoy the dance.

Well. They danced well enough in spite of it all.

* * *

The Inquisitor sees him in the garden, walking with a retinue of messengers behind him, handing him reports. A lifetime ago he was a boy trapped in a cage, and Morrigan admits he has turned into quite fine of a man in the most basic sense—not as handsome as her Rowan, but no one is as handsome as Rowan.

Morrigan watches as the Inquisitor turns from a poised and pristine lioness to a shy kitten as he passes, her cheeks red. Morrigan should not laugh, but she does.

“Go on then,” she says. “Take your pleasure.”

“But I don’t...I don’t know what to say.” What would Orlais say if the Inquisitor stammered in front of the court? “He probably hates me anyway, after everything I said to him about his past, and being here, and—”

“Take your pleasures while you can, Inquisitor. Dare I say if he were here I would myself.”

“You seem like a woman who knows what she’s doing. I don’t.”

And then she tells her the biggest secret of all: “the right man? You will always know what you are doing.”

She rises and leaves the garden with her book, feeling the Inquisitor’s eyes on her. Well, she will learn. Morrigan knows. But she tires of games, as she has given all the advice she can. For now, she is off to find Kieran. ‘Tis been a long day, and she knows he tires of studying


	6. Under a Rowan Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whelp we have a rating change :) Smut below. And there will be smut moving forward. Like...a lot. <3

“The stories speak of your blonde hair.”

Rowan chuckles at Carver, sitting near their fire in the plains outside of Minrathous. “It darkened with age, like my father’s did,” he says, casually running a hand through it. “Happens sometimes, I am told. At least it isn’t gone—Maker knows I should have lost it during the Blight.”

“What was it like?”

So far, Carver has not asked about the before, and the stories they tell of Rowan Cousland, the Hero of Ferelden. Frankly Rowan wouldn’t have minded to tell Carver Hawke about the truth, as Rowan rather likes the man and thinks he’s jolly company—quite the opposite of what his sister Rhine Hawke said of him, though he knows the relationship between siblings is often one of jolly antagonism. At any rate, two Fereldans far from home will typically get along. So far they have bounded over their mabaris long passed (He offers prayers for Hohaku and Spot both) and have spoken of their journeys and what led them to Minrathous. During the day they explore the Tevinter crypts, decoding with the magisters, searching, finding, maybe. And yet it is with this mention of Rowan’s previous blonde hair that makes Carver’s starstruck ways appear.

“Not as glorious as the stories say,” Rowan answers truthfully. “I felt the father of a ragtag motley crew. I felt as though we were the linen wraps on a cracked pillar that was Ferelden. We fought, we sung. And yet we made it.” Rowan leans back, thinks of an analogy. “Tell me, have you ever seen a troop of actors perform a play?”

“Once, in Lothering,” Carver replies. “They performed _The Tale of Sir Galen the Green_. They weren’t very good.”

Certainly not Rowan’s previous company then. “Well, a group of actors that put on a play arrange parts for themselves, and usually among them, there is one who will either take charge, one that others will look to for guidance. ‘How shall we do this scene, where should I stand at this moment.’ Things of that nature. Well, that was I during the Blight. I was the director of sorts, the one who told us where to go. I went to Redcliffe first because that made sense, I thought with the help of the Arl we could travel somewhat safer. Of course we didn’t know he was as sick as he was, poisoned by a blood mage, didn’t know we would have to save his son from possession…”

Rowan laughs to himself. In the early days he assumed things would run smoothly after the mishap at the Circle tower. How wrong he was. “Then after, we got word of a golem in Honnleath. We picked her up—”

Carver raises his brows. “Her?”

“Oh yes. We found that out later. But not before Zevran found us…”

Carver has heard of Zevran Aranai, and he asks two pressing questions of him: one, why on earth would Rowan let a man sent to assassinate him tag along, and two: a golem? Really?

“For all I knew, Loghain would try to assassinate me again,” Rowan replies. “Having a personal battering ram and an assassin seemed a good idea as any, though Morrigan did tell me I would be poisoned one night, and my “pretty face” would end up underneath a rock.”

Carver’s expression turns softer at the mention of his lover, “What was she like?” he asks.

“What is she like,” Rowan corrects. “She is snow and fire, thunder. The cool wind against your cheek, the best and worst idea you have.” The warmth of a kiss after coming in her arms, though Rowan keeps that to himself. “The mother of my son.”

Maker, he misses her. He aches not at night—though he does long for her, but he mostly aches with each new discovery. He wishes he could share it with her, and they would talk and debate for hours. Writing in his journal, it helps, but only partly.

Though after Carver goes to bed Rowan holds his journal, he doesn’t write of the first time with Morrigan as he thought he would initially. They were lovers long before her arms beckoned him to have her, though the more apt way to phrase it is she took him.

Fuck it, he thinks. He’s lonely, and there is little erotica to be had in Tevinter, though his need for crude illustrations has long since dissipated—memories of her are his drug. Thinking he can and should indulge, he opens his journal and writes of laying with her, writes of how her arms always felt both new and old, like home.

* * *

The night they became lovers truly began in the evening almost immediately after Zevran gave Rowan his first and only tattoo. They were in a camp not far from the Dalish they just recruited, Rowan thinking they could stop there before heading for Denerim to find Brother Genitivi. He shouldn’t have been surprised the Dalish had their own problems, but he was. Still, he solved matters appropriately, and now Lanaya was the new Keeper of the Clan, Zathrian’s curse removed. Rowan and his motley crew even got to watch a young couple, Cammen and Gheyna, have their bonding ceremony. They were in their camp not too far from the Dalish after, Rowan freshly inked and standing by the fire.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have gotten involved,” Wynne said near him as Rowan opened a bottle of wine he confiscated from Arl Eamon’s cellar and packed with him. It was the least he could do, as he thought he deserved something nice from Teagan if he was truly going to have to chase a myth and legend and find Andraste’s Ashes. He swiped one thing already sure, but it was truly Alistair’s and neither Eamon’s or Teagan’s, and that not counted as a swipe.

“And what makes you say that?” Rowan asked Wynne, casually sipping the wine.

“Tradition. Cammen is still not a man to the Dalish.”

“Gheyna loved him, she told me so—us so,” Rowan replied. “If she didn’t my words would have meant nothing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Love is all that matters anyway.”

“You think she loves you?”

Rowan stared. He cared for Wynne—not as much as Alistair, though no one could appreciate Wynne as much as the man who viewed her more as the surrogate grandmother he himself never had, but Rowan appreciated her insight and her stories, even if she made fun of his interest in griffons.

This went too far.

“I don’t assume anything with Morrigan,” Rowan said, evenly. “Merely that I enjoy her company.” It was a wonder he hadn’t yet kissed her, though they hardly had time to themselves since the Circle. She volunteered herself to go into the fade over Wynne to save Connor, even bowing for him when she returned victorious, Connor saved. _See?_ She proclaimed to all, Wynne and Irving most— _the apostate returns, alive!_ He had a moment with her after, tried to kiss her in welcome, and yet she brushed him aside and said she would not be kissed as a reward. She would be kissed because she was wanted. He wondered if she saw the bulge in his trousers, the proof she was wanted, but she didn’t mention it, and Rowan sulked. He talked instead to Leliana, who told him stories.

Well. Morrigan didn’t like that. He could see her scowl from all the way across the camp.

From there they ran into Zevran, and Morrigan certainly didn’t like Rowan’s choice recruiting the man. “He is skilled,” Rowan said, defending his choice. “We could use skilled fighters.”

“So skilled you bashed him with your shield and he fell to the ground. A wonder he is, this assassin.” Then she sauntered off inside her tent and Rowan was left with nothing but his aching cock—a gist given from Morrigan’s swaying hips. Minx knew what she was doing too. She reveled in it—torturing him. She tortured him further in his fevered imaginings that night spent with his hand.

From there Rowan and his group met a merchant who pawned off a control rod for a golem in Honnleath. Rowan decided to try out the control rod himself. “A beautiful town, Honnleath,” he said to his party. “If the golem is gone at least we have some pretty scenery.” Maker how Alistair didn’t like that diversion, didn’t like Shale either—though Rowan liked the golem well enough despite her large and booming footsteps every time the party walked. Alistair didn’t like it again when Rowan decided to stop to try to find the Dalish clan in the Brecilian forest before heading to Denerim to find Brother Genitivi, but on that matter, Rowan kept his true opinions to himself, and to Morrigan, who found her way near him again. They hardly talked but she drifted to his presence often, as if she liked to live in his presence, as if he carried the sun. She certainly carried the moon, and if only she knew how he danced in moonlight.

But one night, as he rest by a creek soon after they picked up Shale and Zevran on their way to the forest, Rowan confided in her that he thought it was hopeless.

“That a dead woman’s ashes can cure a dying old man? Likely,” she replied, bringing pools of water down her hair. “But many a mystery rests in this world. Whose to say what is possible or not?

“I’m surprised you think so,” he admitted, as he knew she didn’t believe in any theism. “I know you had no love for what happened in Redcliffe, didn’t approve of me agreeing to Teagan’s request.”

“I’d rather we keep the ashes for ourselves if they are in fact as miraculous as that Orlesian woman thinks,” she admitted. “But you have a task, Grey Warden, to unite the land. You are the lone son of a family betrayed, this Arl Eamon poisoned because Loghain feared his power. Battles are better won under one banner. ‘Tis what the stories say.”

Grey Warden. Maker how he didn’t like to be reminded. “Rowan,” he corrected.

“Grey Warden,” she said again.

She asked without asking that night, swaying her hips as she left him, mentioning how cold her tent was. He didn’t come, despite his ache. But he wanted to be taken as Rowan.  
Their squabbles were apparent at the Dalish camp, Rowan’s urgings of love to the young couple Cammen and Gheyna not endearing his sorceress. Then Rowan admired the tattoos across the faces of the Dalish—the markings for Mythal and Andruil, others as well. Zevran who was also tattooed, albeit differently than the Dalish, asked him if he had any himself.

“Mother would have killed me,” Rowan said. “I do not.”

“Well, if you had one, what would it be?”

“A griffon,” Rowan said, Wynne muttering “Maker’s breath,” to herself before Rowan realizing there would be another symbol he would want: a rowan tree, or leaf from it, after the Rowan tree his mother sat under in Highever before his birth.

“I could find the tools. Perhaps I could indulge.”

Zevran found the tools and Rowan asked him for a leaf on his lower abdomen after they helped the Dalish. Zevran did just that for him, but not first massaging the area with oakmoss and another spicy scent to prep the area and ease the sting of the needle. “For your lady witch,” Zevran said with a smirk, though as Rowan looked for her at the camp during the process, she was nowhere to be found. Still as he stood with Wynne, he couldn’t find her. Later he learned how she wanted him to come to her.

“Do not bother,” Wynne advised, knowing what Rowan wanted to do. “She hardly ever looks into your eyes, only what’s below.”

“It’s quite a lot below.”

Wynne scowled at Rowan’s tasteless joke, and he apologized after he rid himself of his bawdy laughter. He remembered that night on the boat with her well enough, and he remembered her in the Wilds. She may have liked the idea of his cock, but she liked his eyes just as much.

He told Alistair and Leliana he would be back, and though Leliana smirked with knowing what he was up to, Alistair groaned. “Oh let him have this.” Leliana said, and it was Rowan’s chant as he searched the woods, let me have this, let me see her. He wasn’t searching for long. He found Morrigan not too far from camp near a creek, sitting under a tree.

Not just any tree. A rowan tree.

The berries packed onto the branches and against the leaves were a rich red, but Morrigan’s berry purple and red lips were richer. He watched her sometimes mix berries in a small mortar and pestle and stain her lips with the juices, and she created a paint for her eyes in a similar matter. She used coal to line her eyes, darken her lashes, and often she pinched her cheeks to create color. Across her neck was a silver chain he found in a chest in Honnleath and gave to her, though that did not fully draw away her dour moods. He gave it to her, even set it around her neck as she asked. Yet all it offered him was a small smirk upon her lips.

“Grey Warden,” she said, her cheek upon her hand, sitting beneath the tree. “You are once again, victorious.”

“Thanks partially to my companions. You.”

“You did not take me to the forest, to the ruins,” she reminded.

He tentatively walked closer to her, and when he chanced to sit next to her, she did not move away. “I do believe you were angry at me,” he said. “My antics have not swayed you of late.”

“You must be more selfish.”

What did she mean? With her? Did she want to be taken away for a tryst in a woodland? Did he want to find her in the heat of battle, seek her lips for a sweet reprieve? Or did she want the two of them to run away, forget Ferelden, forget duty?

He laughed bitterly. “I can’t,” he said. “I am a son who lost his family. And I am a Grey Warden, as you so often say.”

“That doesn’t mean you must help every little girl that comes crawling at your feet.”

“Is that what it is?” He asked. “Your jealousy?”

“I…I would—”

“You are jealous, Morrigan,” he said flatly.

“I offered you to come to my tent.”

“But as a Grey Warden. Not me. Not Rowan. And I would not dream of making love to you vexed.”

“’Tis not the best?”

He shook his head. “’Tis best when you lay together in passion, in desperate want. After you have been clawing for one another, all day, all week, a month.”

A tentative hand rest against her thigh. She studied his hand, worn from battle. She liked it. “’Tis what knights do,” he said. “They help people. Forgive me for being a knight. But know…I claw and crave for only you.”

“Knights care not for wild things like me.”

“I care.”

He extended his hand to her, and she let him. She let him cup her cheek in his hand, not tot tame the wildling, but to merely hold her. Still, she asked, “do you?” and she pointed out again he did not come to her, only wooed her in ways fit for a lady of his previous life.

“You are to be wooed. I think you should be wooed often and by someone who knows how,” he said. “Maybe I’m the proper person. But this is…chaos that we live in. Forgive me if I find it hard to be selfish, if I worry you do not want my body. Need I remind though I have come to you now, to woo.” To do more.

Her hands wrapped around his arm, and she leaned in, yellow eyes heavy. “You are…” she said, and he felt his cock harden, “an exalted creature. A wonder. And…” She leaned in further, her breath caressing his ear. “A knight.”

“My lady knew I would find her here, didn’t she?

Her lips pressed against his first, and yet he answered deeply, reverently, his tongue seeking an entrance she gave. Her lips were berries and tart and lighting and fire and frost.

“I am no lady,” she whispered when they parted. “I am a wild thing, and you…” She gripped his hair, hard. “Mine.”

They fell to the ground under the rowan tree. She rubbed her heat against his aching cock. He moaned and she cried yes, yes, I want to hear you.

“Morrigan, are…we—we only just kissed.”

She laughed in a merry, girlish way. “Such decorum,” she said, “such pleasantries and wooing.” She sank against him, pressing her forehead to his and playing with his hair. She enraptured him with another kiss, more frost than fire. “I have been alone far too long, thinking of your hands of yours,” she muttered. “Hmm. ’Tis quite a shame they haven’t yet gripped my hips.”

Yet his knowledge was nothing save the smell of metallic and sweet Morrigan. And when she slid backward and forwards against the length of him, realizing how much of him she could encase, the small glen that became their scene of wooing filled with her laughter.

“You please me so…and you’re not even inside,” she said, and Rowan did what she wanted so—he gripped her hips.

“Please me further,” she ordered, mellifluous.

“You are the one on top of me,” he pointed out.

“Will you feel so emasculated if it stays that way?”

He shook his head, laughing. “I should like to spend an eternity under your thighs, my wildling.”

He found out the full extent of her outfit’s assembly then, just how many bits and scraps assembled into what she called an outfit, what Rowan found finer than any grand dress he ever saw in his life before. Her skin was fevered and pleasant under his calloused hands, yet she was also a warm frost, his hands both gripping her hips and gently outlining the pink of her nipple, the swell of her breasts. She hummed, approvingly. Then she yanked down his breeches just enough to free him, and she couldn’t help but have her hand glide over him, grip him. He grunted, low and guttural. Her hand was much preferable to his, and he was so much bigger in her delicate yet firm hand. Then she wanted to see all of him, and she helped him throw off his tunic, Rowan raising his hands so it may be easier.

“Ah,” she said, for he realized she noticed the tattoo. “A rowan leaf, given by our dear assassin.”

“Do you not like it?”

“Well enough,” she replied, tracing it with her finger. “No matter. There are other things about you more pleasing.”

“Morr— _oooh Maker_.”

He was inside her without mercy, she rode him without mercy, slamming down on his cock and not letting herself fully leave him before she began again. He wasn’t averse in his life before to a woman on top of him—sometimes he preferred it, but with his only other lover, (and Maker the word thrilled him—lover.) Briana liked her weight on top of him, and he was keen to indulge.

Whether it was Morrigan who indulged him or the other way around, he couldn’t be sure. They indulged each-other, he decided and realized, her nails racking down the fine hair on his chest and abdomen. She wanted to touch him everywhere and he was all too willing to be the canvas of her want, the two of them under the Rowan tree a piece of the finest art ever dared painted.

“I…Morrigan…” Maker he was going to come and spill inside of her. She had filled his cup and it was on the verge of tipping spilling. “I’m going to come.”

“So soon?” She chuckled, temporarily stopping her ministrations. “I have heard tales of Grey Warden endurance.”

“Been a long time and you’re—”

She laughed again and his heart fluttered. He wanted more laughter, more everything with her. Rising, he cradled her back and set her against the grass so he was the one on top, and he stroked and caressed and licked and kissed. She had scars here and there from a life in the wilds, a taut stomach and willowy long legs, and as he explored, though not as thorough as he would on other occasions, his cock covered in her arousal rolled against and wet her thigh. We are the wild things, he thought as he licked her clit and tasted her salt, made her come against his mouth before putting his hands on either side of her. He slipped inside her warmth at last, her leg hooking over him. We are free. And I am building, building…

“Come inside,” she muttered. “I want to feel you.”

“Morrigan, what if…?”

A babe, now? He couldn’t risk yet. Yet she pressed sweetly her finger to his lips.

“Worry not,” she whispered. “I know a spell.”

He came. Maker, he came, shattering, crumpling, rebuilding, Morrigan putting her hands on his hips and letting him spill, and then he collapsed atop her and they were a messy and tangled web of entwinned limbs, Rowan’s breeches pathetically still wrapped around his legs. As he cooled from his lust and came back to earth, reluctantly removing himself— though she grabbed onto him all the more tightly as his arms became her blanket, Rowan reeled.

“Grass is itchy,” he said, and his head hurt against the tree bark.

“I like it.”

Her arms were around him. He supposed he liked it too. He kissed her again.

“Why did you wait?” She asked after, looking at him. “You could have had me earlier, if you wished.”

“You didn’t come to me,” he replied. “I wanted you to come to me.” The way it played, at least she kissed first.

“No matter. ‘Tis done now,”

She rose from his arms and began putting back on her clothes, bit by bit. He rose, puzzled. “’Tis done now?” he asked. “Is that what—”

“Merely, the first time,” she replied. “We are together now. If you wish it again…which I think you will…” She smirked. “I will have you.”

From the grass, now something he deemed comfortable, he took her arm. She paused. “Stay,” he said. “For a while.”

“The others will find us.”

“Let them.”

She leaned down, didn’t kiss him but stroke his jawline, his growing beard. “I don’t want them to find you like this. This is how I see you, Rowan.”

“Only you,” he muttered.

“Yes. But sleep now, if you wish. Only if you wish.”

“Sleep. With you…”

He was drifting and she helped him along. She stayed.

As it turned out, Morrigan was right. They were found, but thankfully by Hahaku, who woke Rowan with a few licks to his temple. Hastily after a few pets Rowan dressed, finding Morrigan sitting by the creek, washing her hair. By the time he sat by her side, she already had it up in her signature haphazard style.

“Dear me,” she said. “I haven’t had time to read Mother’s grimoire yet. Will I ever now, at night?”

“You may have to wear me out a little first.”

She wore him out once more before they returned to camp, though at first she was annoyed so at Hahaku bouncing around and watching them. To solve the problem Rowan threw a stick, and off he went. They returned to camp after, though not hand in hand. It took a bit longer for Rowan to get to hold her hand. Took a bit longer to pour a little more love on her.

What a journey it was, however.

* * *

Far from her in Tevinter, he wonders if they should have waited. His decision is the same as it has always been, a firm and resounding no. Their love story is theirs. That is that.  
Besides, starting early certainly gave him happier nights on the road ahead.


	7. The Trouble with the Quill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay!

In the early evening after a day about town, Carver notices Rowan tapping his quill against his journal and knows what he’s thinking about. (Indeed sometimes when Rowan explores Minrathous, he wonders if Morrigan would like it. Certainly she would marvel at the magister’s work. Rowan will chastise his homeland for one thing and one thing only, as unlike their homeland Ferelden, Tevinter is not afraid of magic. The city uses magical power to only it’s fullest advantage, allowing lyrium to light the streets and the sky as second stars. Kieran would marvel, of that Rowan is sure. He decides Morrigan would too, until inevitably someone would brush against her on the street. Denerim really didn’t agree with her, after all as they looked for Brother Genitivi. But how Rowan caught her marveling at the buildings and the vendors selling fine Dwarven crafts and jewelry. She was always such a reveler of little baubles and pieces of adornment for the body. He even parted with a few coins to give her a silver bracelet she seemed to admire. If she were here he’d buy her turquoise jewels as the magisters wear, then they’d make love and she’d only wear those jewels.)

“Having trouble?” Carver asks. “You seem like you’re having trouble.”

Rowan doesn’t know what to write, that’s the problem. He sees the first time they made love and a few times after, though after a certain point they all blur together. She is a whirlwind and their time together was a storm of the century. After making love in a forest surrounded by spirits, to Denerim and then to Haven they paraded as two joyful miscreants who reveled in each other. Everyone knew they were madly in lust. How they loved it. Two joyful exhibitionists, two drifters off to see the world.

“Do not forget your duty,” Morrigan bade him one night, her lips tasting of frost and wild berries.

“I couldn’t dare,” he said, laying flush in his tent, caught in her spell. “I do it for us, and people like us.”

It angered her, that there would be other people like them. “I mean lovers,” he made sure to say. “Lovers like us.”

“Tis no other woman like me, and no other man like you,” she said. “Do not forget.”

“No one else but us,” he echoed, drifting off to the fade. “No one else…”

She stuck a ring on his finger one night before they made it to Denerim to find Genitivi, demanding he not get too many ideas about it. It was merely there for his own protection. “Are you proposing marriage to me in a secret Chasined ritual?” Rowan asked, Morrigan hovering naked on top of him and not even bothering to cover herself in furs. How pale she went. It was for practicality, she was sure to say, not a ritual of bind. If he was lost she could find her. That was that.

“I’m rather tall and blonde,” he said. “I’d be hard to lose.”

She stared, her yellow eyes a harsh gold rather than warm honey. “You know what I mean.” Even today they still aren’t married by the state, though they’re married in only the ways that matter. He wears the ring he gave her long ago on his left hand like a wedding ring, and she wears several chains around her neck as her own bauble and token of their union. He can feel her sometimes through the ring. She’s warm right now, so she must be with Kieran. He wishes he were there.

He wants to write, commit more to memory, but maybe he should leave it to others better equipped. So he tells Carver what he sees but cannot give pen to. His memories are fluid and have no sense of time. From after Denerim to find Genitivi to the getting the urn and healing the Arl, to the Deep Roads—their last stop. One memory finds itself sectioned in his mind above a few others—the memory of a talk he had with her in Denerim as he gave her that silver chain. “If mother was here, she would scold my vanity,” she said to him as he placed it around her swanlike neck. “Of course, she would also tell me that I already have you, and there is no need for more foolishness.” It wasn’t the first time Morrigan made a quip about her mother and the things that she often said to her. Cruel things Rowan never heard from his own parents, even in his youth when his father questioned his sensitivity and tears. Flemeth had an assortment of cruel jabs according to Morrigan, and yet she mentioned them as easily as she would mention a laundry list. She even imparted a moment where Flemeth used Morrigan for bait, Rowan’s jaw dropping.

“I wasn’t young.” She said of the time, and yet Rowan thought it mattered not.

“Your mother isn’t a romantic it seems,” Rowan said of her mother at Denerim’s market, admiring the glint of silver around her neck, not even skimming the surface of what he truly thought of her.

“Of that, she is not,” Morrigan replied with little emotion. It was a mere fact.

“But you are.”

Her eyes hardened as she studied him. “Do not have false notions of us, knight.”

At least she wasn’t calling him “Grey Warden,” anymore, and she hadn’t for some time. Rowan didn’t like to be called that, even if it was the truth. He liked it even less that she seemed to diminish what they had. Sometimes he thought of telling her as he lay buried inside of her _I do not take this lightly, I don’t,_ but she left him in such a fog that he never said the words. She was light and airy throughout the day, then she would kiss him fiercely at camp or when they were behind a closed door to of one of the innkeepers rooms—a luxury Wynne always chastised him for whenever he partook in getting rooms for himself and his companions, though she certainly had to admit her back was far better suited for an actual bed than a lumpy bedroll.

From there, Rowan admits to Carver he wishes he could remember it all. “If I could I’d write every step—have each of my comrades and companions chime in as well I would. But I’m afraid Alistair doesn’t like me too much anymore…though I hope he’s gotten over it.”

Alistair was Rowan’s friend. Maker, Morrigan even said once he may have been more jealous than he should have been of his relationship with her. Maybe he wished it was him with Rowan. Rowan had doubts back then and doubts still, but the fact remained they had many a good talk about royalty and responsibility. Rowan even told Alistair he had to be selfish sometimes, and Alistair agreed before cursing that “sister” Goldanna of his and her name. Yet then at Arl Eamon’s estate in Denerim months later, Rowan was subject to a harsh tongue lashing for a decision he made. Friends once and not after. Nothing has been the same between him and Alistair since.

“Ah.” He pushes that from his mind, not withing to remember. “I am trying to write the memories I have with my lover, not the entire journey. I wish I could, but even memories with her blur together.”

“Is there one that stands out?”

Rowan snorts. “Yes.”

“Will you tell it to me?”

“Let is suffice to say…” Rowan says, stretching and taking his quill, “the fair lady asked her knight to slay a dragon.”

* * *

“You can’t be serious.”

By all accounts, she was dead serious. The two laid side by side, a blanket covering their lower halves. Morrigan would have been fine with the two both laying bare as the Maker intended with her magic keeping them warm. But Rowan, who though wasn’t religious, had a modicum of modesty and managed to pull the fur blanket over their bodies. Maker she was good with moving her hips, good with her lips and mouth, good with her eyes as she gave him her mouth. He could still see her twinkling eyes as she finished him, still feel her atop him, even as she brought her gargantuan request.

“I appear to be teasing?” She asked, baffled. “Tell me, when do I tease, dear knight?”

He could think of a few times. He kept them to himself. “M—me?” he stammered. “Kill Flemeth, the Witch of the Wilds?”

“I believe in you.” Morrigan said with mischievous eyes, skimming her hand against the coarse hair on his chest. “’Tis what knights do, and you seem to be one indeed. Or at least you act as such.”

“Morrigan…”

Biting his lip, he sunk his head against one of the pillows, rubbing his eyes. He felt her inch closer to him, the back of her fingers against his cheek, the other hand trailing downward, downward…

“Please no,” he said. “Not now.”

“Do I tire you so?”

“No,” he said, refusing his endurance to be questioned, his Grey Warden endurance. But they had patterns he saw fit to break. Anytime he wanted to discuss something with her, something serious, she’d get that look and he’d be lost and they’d be lost in each other. He had brief stints with romance before—loved Briana dearly when he traveled with her and the other actors for a time, but this was different. Of course during the day he could keep his mind on duties and whatever the next great disaster impending on Ferelden was. But once he was just Rowan and he could be a friend and lover—mostly lover, he was never truly satisfied. Even when he had her and they made love it was always the incessant need of more, more, more. The more she gave and satisfied the hungrier he grew, the more he craved her taste. His craving for his wildling would drive him beautifully and wonderfully mad.

He would do this for her, because she asked. He knew not how, but if he had to, he would kill Flemeth, and she knew it too when he asked if he had a time limit of sorts. He must have seen relief in her eyes, as it was something he hadn’t seen before, and she shook her head. “Though I think, the sooner the better.”

“After this business with the dwarves? I’m sure it won’t take long.”

The understatement of the century, yet they didn’t know it then. They didn’t know much then admittedly, other than they were two cogs in a machine trying to make the world back to where it was, and they wanted each other. When she kissed him and he kissed her back, they kissed as young lovers. It led to more.

She wasn’t averse to him on top—in fact she wasn’t averse to a few positions. However, she always had such a demand in the way she moved her hips or held him when he was on top. That night, she didn’t, or at least it wasn’t as so. She took all his kisses, held and supported him. Only for a moment though. As soon as he came, she was the same again, telling him he should get up, lest his other friends would gossip more than they had already. He wanted to stay. He didn’t tell her he wanted to stay. At the very least, he was hungry and could justify that was why he was leaving, though it stung when he asked her if she wanted anything and she said not to worry about her. Frankly he could get used to worrying about her—had already. He kept it to himself.

Once dressed and out, searching his knapsack for a bit of bread and cheese to eat, it was Leliana who found him first and ushered him over to sit by her side by the fire. “I don’t know what to do,” he said to her, sitting by her side, munching on hard bread. He stared at the dancing embers.

“Judging by her glow, you do indeed.”

Against his better self, he snickered. “I meant…” He lowered his voice. “I’ve never felt this deeply about anyone, and I have the feeling that—”

“Do you think she’s using you?”

Rowan blinked. “Do you?”

Leliana shook her head. At least she didn’t think as Wynne or Alistair felt. At least he had a couple of people on his side.

“I think…if I can be bold.”

Rowan braced himself, but said “always.”

“I think you’re more deeply in love than she is.”

“I could have told you that,” Rowan said, his chuckle masking how he truly felt. “Though maybe it’s not love.”

“It is.”

“Maybe one day I’ll realize it wasn’t.”

“No. One day you’ll realize it was a different kind if love, at the very least. Still it’s love. Or at least, that’s what I think.”

A different kind of love, but still love. Leliana was right.

* * *

“Tell me about a girl you like.”

Carver, lounging on his rug and throw pillows, looks at Rowan. “I thought you were writing,” he says.

“Still am,” Rowan replies, “but writing can be done anywhere. Our time together won’t be forever.”

Carver chuckles, covering his face with his hands, but Rowan hears one word, clear as day: “ _Merrill._ ”

Rowan gets comfortable as Carver speaks of a woman his sister knew and traveled with—a Dalish elf who later lived in the Kirkwall alienage. Carver blushes when he speaks of her. He cares for her a great deal Rowan gathers—but their relationship wasn’t consummated.

“Go back to her,” Rowan suggests. “Tell her how you feel.”

“Enough of me. If you can’t write, you can talk more about her.”

“I’ve told you already.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

Rowan sighs. “I miss her. Is that enough?” Maker I she misses me too. He could feel it. He knew.

“There is more indeed,” he says, relenting. “We practiced sex so we wouldn’t be able to practice love.”

“Can’t they be related?”

“Sure,” Rowan replies. “Of course. But Morrigan always said it was nothing but flesh. At first.”

What changed Carver asks. Rowan, who had been thinking about it and knew he had to get there eventually thinks it’s time he spoke of the Deep Roads. First to Carver, then to his journal, he goes back to how she held him, how she made the nightmares go away. Somewhere far from her, Morrigan must feel it too.

She always does.


	8. To Have and To Hold

Early morning. They share mornings and nights and Morrigan thinks of it in her bed before she rises. Somewhere Rowan is thinking of her. She can feel it as she lays in her bed at Skyhold. He taught her well of love, Kieran offering his own teachings later. They have a home together, near the forests in Ferleden—a small hut perfect for them. Before their duties took them apart, they learned further there, together. Someday she’ll leave this place to further learn.

Alone in her bed at Skyhold, she has a mind to think and dream. Laying alone in her bed she recalls Rowan and her in that ridiculous idea she had—the skiff on Lake Calenhad as they traveled from Denerim to the mountains. It was all carnal and heat, salt and sun. Man and him, hands everywhere. Her own are such a poor substitute. She draws out a dream, and yet it is the after she longs for more than anything, to hold and be held by a man with strong arms. He never made her feel as though she was too small or too much. For him, she was always the right size. Never did he make her shrink.

Never would she. He knew. How she loves his understanding.

They did not go to that town of Haven first after Denerim. As they were near Orzammar, Rowan thought to travel there. Had he known the chaos he’d be warped into, to this day he says he would have gone to Haven first. Perhaps the succession crisis with the dwarves would have sorted itself without his intervention. Of that, Morrigan doubts. Ferelden was falling apart. Rowan was the only that could mend. In Orzammar he mended by choosing the son rather than the usurper for the throne, got into an argument with Alistair about it as well. It was not the last. Morrigan selfishly found amusement in Alistair’s demeanor and poutiness at the decision. All until the final task. All until he told her he wouldn’t take her with him to the Deep Roads.

He left her and she had a mind to berate him for it. Yet it wasn’t as though he didn’t want her there. He protected her and she was too angry at him at the time to realize, too proud in her view that nothing could happen to her. Yet at the time, she wanted to fight by his side. She roamed instead, away from Leliana and the others Rowan also left behind. As a wolf and raven, as herself, she saw the mountains and the sea. She craved him by her side. She wanted to everything with him.

She should have known then. Instead, it took that.

He was hers again soon enough, Morrigan sensing him through the ring she gave. He needed home, he needed love. She found him at the tavern in Orzammar, too swimming with thoughts to drink as his newest rancid companion by his side did, but when she called his name, his real name and not “Warden,” he rose from the bar and took her in his arms, held her there for the longest time without a care who saw. The witch casts spells they all must have said. He cared not to hear them—he only wanted her and her sweet voice.

She never called him “Warden” again after that. She saw what only being a Warden could do. And in their time together, he only gave her Rowan.

In the tavern, he’d never held her as he did then, neither before nor after though some moments have held semblances of it. Before that moment, she’d never been held like that before at all by anyone. Of course she told him of her aversion her touches—mostly handshakes and how she didn’t understand them—but that embrace, that taking and giving? She sought to dissolve herself into his arms, meld until she couldn’t feel anything more. Have him fuck her basely, and without care.

He did just that. She would have suggested a room at the tavern, but he had no mind to stay trapped underground. He told his companions he’d meet them outside Orzammar within a day. Such proud exhibitionists they were, not afraid that everyone knew. They found a quiet space in the woods, her magic keeping him them warm, and he took her and he tasted her. She, understanding, asked him to take. _Feel like Rowan_ , she said to him as he kissed her, moving inside her, undoing her with his fingers. _Don’t feel like a Warden. Feel as yourself._

He gave her a mirror after, golden and jeweled and akin to the one Flemeth destroyed, all those years ago. A gift, he called it. She couldn’t yet tell him how he was her favorite gift.

Memories, memories, such a long long time ago. She shifts and thinks of the night on the skiff, the first night together, the night in Denerim or the night of their reunion for good as she undoes herself, but the night after the Deep Roads is what she turns toward. If she had Rowan then she’d tell him no mercy, touch me everywhere, then come in my arms. He was so young then, handsome in her mind. He’s handsomer now with his darker hair she enchanted from blonde. To give him anonymity. He is a lived, gallant knight, her knight.

‘Tis mercy she finishes before the knock on the door, though she’s vexed to be pulled from her sweet imaginings. Dressing quickly she opens the door to find Leliana, too stiff for warm greetings, merely and only straight to the point.

“The Commander,” Leliana says. “Can you help him?”

She raises a brow. “Surely the Commander would need no help from me. And why do you ask on his behalf? The Inquisitor informs me you bare little love for him.” The Inquisitor tells her many things. The Inquisitor even admires her. Morrigan sees it when she asks of her magic, her story. She’s ask to retell everything if she knew she could.

Flattering. And Overwhelming.

Once Leliana retold stories. Morrigan is no bard but she finds herself an oddity to the Inquisitor, an academic interest. She indulges. Yet Leliana has grown colder in the years, beaten in a stoicism and cynicism that Morrigan once carried and carried well and can still carry if pressed. Rowan is disappointed in her. He tells her sometimes.

Standing straighter, Leliana informs Morrigan they haven’t seen the Commander in days, and the Inquisitor frets so, hovering in his room. He’s haunted by nightmares, Leliana says. Perhaps, if Morrigan still knows the remedy, she can mix the potion that she gave Rowan those long years ago.

“I know still,” Morrigan says. “I have some ready.” They are for Kieran, when his night terrors endure. “I will give them, though surely the Commander will not want the help of an apostate.”

“I don’t think he’s in the position to protest.”

Indeed, he isn’t. Though Leliana offered to take them to his office, Morrigan enters with them. The Inquisitor sits on the large and expansive desk with her brows knit together, clothes and hair disarrayed. Morrigan looked as such once.

“Give your lover this,” she says. “It eases nightmares.”

The Inquisitor takes them, thanks Morrigan over and over again. She’s half mad, purple shadows under her eyes. She climbs up the ladder in the office and it strikes Morrigan how utterly odd it is—the Commander of the army sleeps in a loft upstairs. Above, the Inquisitor speaks softly to him, sweet words Morrigan can’t hear. Of course she’ll comfort him, hold him, love on him. She’ll discover holding a lover is like holding the world if she doesn’t know it already.

Back to her Morrigan goes. Jealousy isn’t becoming she was told once. By Mother, and by Wynne. Two biddies too willing to spout their learned advice.

But she is jealous. She’ll admit it. She wants Rowan. And when days pass with no sign of the Inquisitor, Morrigan wishes still.

Three days later, she finally sees the Inquisitor in the garden. Purple shadows line her eyes, telltale of sleepless nights. Otherwise however, she greets Morrigan warmly when she sees her, thanks her once more. The Commander will live.

“I was so worried,” she says of him. “I don’t believe in the Maker but…” he sighs, twiddling her thumbs. “I just want his pain to be taken away.”

Morrigan has wished Rowan’s nightmares could cease, his sleepless nights cease. “Be there for him,” she says. “’Tis all you can do.”

“I know.”

She says she wishes he wouldn’t ride to the Arbor Wilds, would order him if she didn’t feel cruel doing it. “Kings of old stories rode with their men,” Morrigan says to that. “Your man is the Commander of this army of yours. ‘Tis custom, for him to lead them, stand with them, no?”

“Die with them if he must,” she mutters, echoing a conversation perhaps they have had. Ah, sweet, tumultuous conversation. Morrigan misses it. “He says better men than him have died already.”

“But not to you.”

They share a look, one of knowing.

“I shouldn’t worry,” the Inquisitor says. “He tells me he must worry about me, not the other way around.”

“If you worry a little you will not fall.”

They look and observe one another, two women in love. “Tell me more about him,” she says, not surprising Morrigan. “Tell me of you two. Please.”

I could tell her everything, Morrigan thinks, and perhaps she’ll feel better and we’ll bond as two lovers in a time of war. I can tell her how I thought we would be one sort of matter yet turned into another. I can tell her my faults, how I fretted and how I worried when I didn’t stand by his side when he took the archdemon. I could tell her I left him, and he came back to me.

Not today. She will however, tell another.

* * *

They sit in the garden underneath the gazebo where Morrigan begins, clearing her throat and prefacing the story with details of before. Before they went back to Denerim for the Landsmeet, Rowan told the now healed Arl Eamon that there was a matter to attend to before they could arrive in Denerim. It took time to call forth the Ferelden nobility at any rate, and Eamon agreed. Rowan did that though, for her. For her, he would defeat Flemeth.

“As in your mother?”

“My mother was no mother,” she says. “I learned how to be a mother through Kieran. I raised him differently than I. I—” She sighs. ‘Twas Rowan who taught her first about Flemeth, made her realize what she already knew. No mother should act this way, he said. How right he was.

“He left with a small party,” Morrigan says, continuing. “An hour passed. They came back. ‘Twas Alistair—yes, the King Alistair now with the Queen Anora. Rowan matched them together, thought it would be the best fit for the Kingdom. Alistair took it better than I first thought, though whatever friendship he and Rowan once had is no longer.”

“Why?”

She laughs. “Such interruptions Lady Inquisitor. Let is suffice to say Rowan spared the man Alistair hated from execution. ‘Twas bold I’d say, and the man made himself useful well enough.”

“Loghain.”

Morrigan nods. “As I was saying, however, ‘twas Alistair and Leliana that carried Rowan from Flemeth’s hut. She was slain, but Rowan fell in battle. Fire. I was angry at first,” she admits, not something she wears with pride. “But only for the first. I told him never charge at a mage’s fire. He didn’t heed my warnings and instead decided to charge toward a dragon. While I was angry of course Alistair was angry as well—he was always so vexed. He told me ‘twas my fault my lover could have died. As if I didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“…Nevertheless they brought him to the camp and the tent. One of his other mage companions named Wynne healed him while that vile the dwarf pulled me away. Such a collection of outcasts Rowan had, and when the dwarf joined he claimed ‘one more armed lunatic wouldn’t do any harm.’ Rowan liked him, I suppose he was alright in the end. Perhaps. He offered a drink during this time when I worried.” She scoffed. “I would not drink a thing he gave me.

“I came to him. Wynne hovered over him—the other mage I spoke of earlier. She too hailed from the Circle like you. She never favored me or us. Though later she informed me she thought I loved him, saw it when he came back to the camp. As if I needed an old biddy to tell me what I knew already…”

Morrigan sighs. “She was a powerful mage,” she chooses to say. “Proof perhaps the Circles can harness potent sorcerers. Though truer magic is harnessed elsewhere. Like yourself, no?”

“Yes,” Lydia says, proud. “Like myself.”

“I came to him. His eyes fluttered open and I cupped his cheeks in my hands. He kept his eyes on me. Only me. He smiled. Wounded, healing, he smiled at me and told me, I am victorious, for you.

“He healed, that’s the short of it. Of course he healed. The stories say he defeated the Blight, no? And the magics did well. Wynne was a talented mage as I said earlier—faithful to Rowan and stood by his side. And all that time while he slept and I laid by his side, I thought: he did that for me. He risked his life and when he lay injured, he didn’t curse, he didn’t fight. He smiled at me. He loved—loves me.”

Surely he loved and loves still. Her, and their son. He listened to her when she talked, came to her when he needed her. He protected her, tried to find her when she left him. He did find her near the Eluvian. He was angry of course. He had a right. She left, didn’t tell him of Kieran. They made up for lost time, will make up when her work here is done.

Laying with him as he was healed in his tent, she couldn’t tell him then of the truth of the Wardens, not when he was injured. She’d tell him when they were closer to their goal. In telling him she’d have to tell him too how Wardens stopped Blights, and would that be a thing to tell a wounded man she loved? No. She held him, kissed him, talked to him as another world existed outside his tent, with only Wynne coming in periodically to check on him and rebandage his wounds while his hound pranced around the tent demanding an entrance. He slept most of the time. He dreamed. She brewed ailments for him to drink so his dreams wouldn’t be ill-fashioned, the same potion Morrigan gave the Inquisitor’s lover. Morrigan tells these tales of holding Rowan and she tells them well.

“You must have held the world last night and all times when you were with him,” Morrigan says. “’Twas the same for I. I held the world. I hold the world. With Rowan. With Kieran, when we’re together. I—”She will not cry, though she knows the Inquisitor will not judge or think ill of her. Crying is a gift for Rowan and and Kieran.

“I wonder why I tell you this,” Morrigan says. “He was healed and the romantic fool claimed I healed him with my ardent mouth and my love. I wanted to do everything with him, and yet after a time… I asked him to end it—”

The Inquisitor blinks. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“Because it was so much that I thought no, I could not do it. I was not built for such feeling. I thought.”

“All so strange Lady Morrigan.”

Morrigan asks her what she means. She laughs. “I have heard tales of you,” she says, “ Witch of the wilds who was the Hero of Ferelden’s lover. She cast spells on him, ensorcelled him. Leliana told me I shouldn’t trust you because she had dealings with you in the past. But when I met you I thought you were…well. Perhaps someone a younger me would have wanted to emulate.”

“The Lady Inquisitor wanting to be a witch of the wilds and bog.”

“I like you style,” Lydia says with a smile. “And you are also rather…romantic.”

“I am no such thing.”

A blatant lie. Lydia sees through it. “Why did you act with Rowan then? Why was it all sex at first?”

“Leliana’s tongue wagged about that as well?”

“She is my spymaster.”

“Because,” Morrigan says, “Rowan would have given me everything if I asked, with no question. It was frightening. He was maddening. I needed him for something that he refused, but then I found…I didn’t need it anyway. I never did. He risked his life for me, and then after I left him, he found me again. I understood. I would not be without him.”

“Bring him.”

Such an order she wants to fulfull. “I will not fall while I am needed. I am not so weak that—”

“No,” the Inquisitor says. “You are not weak. But…”

“Inquis—”

“Take your pleasures where you can.”

The Inquisitor rises and departs. Such a woman, Morrigan thinks. Such a leader.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah, Kieran is actual a human child, Loghain made the ultimate sacrifice. No dark ritual :)

**Author's Note:**

> I always welcome comments! And if you fancy, follow me on tumblr! :D https://a-shakespearean-in-paris.tumblr.com/ (I post updates and multi-fandom :) )


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